Images on their own page?

[yaelslater]

Hi Mozers,

We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages.

Should the standalone pages be indexable?

On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title.

On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic.

Unsure.

Would appreciate any guidance!

Yael

[effectdigital]

You need to clarify whether you mean images on their own page, or images on their own URL (two different things)

This is an image on its own page:

https://www.bloodstock.uk.com/events/boa-2019/gallery

Depending upon the nature of the page, you may or may not want to de-index URLs like this. In the example of Bloodstock festival, it would be crazy to de-index their gallery images which many people are explicitly looking for. In other circumstances, you get 'weird' pages which end users are never meant to see. Fragments which have minimal styling and just the image, those can usually be de-indexed. Sometimes an image on a single page is very useful for users (imagine if Pinterest banned all actual pins from the SERPs) but other times they're just back-end fragments which have escaped. Know the difference

This is an image on its own URL:

https://assets-bloodstock.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/captioned_photo/image/8557/display_desktop_Ross_the_Boss_Bloodstock2109_KatjaOgrin-94.jpg

When you load this up, there's no container. No HTML, no site at all - JUST the image on its own. Don't de-index these, or Google can't see your images - even when they're embedded on a web-page!

Hope that helps

[yaelslater]

Thank you! Now that I've read your response, the answer seems so obvious! Very helpful.

[Dalerio-Consulting]

It depends on how it is implemented on your website. If it's just a plain page with a title and description, and just the image slammed into the page with no content, then it won't do any good for page or image SEO. Instead, it can even harm your indexability as the pages might consume some of the "crawl budget". You can read more about it in my answer here.

My suggestion would be to link to the images directly. If you want to however keep the image pages, you can set them not to be indexed through the meta no-index tag in the header. Regarding image SEO I would suggest you work more on optimizing the image file name, title and description on the page where you are using it, and keep creating quality links for your website and pages.

I hope my answer was helpful to you. If I had a link to the website I would be able to give you a more accurate response/solution.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com
[email protected]