Sheesh!

Another MFA question.

Ann

Image pages almost always have low click-through rates. Most likely they will drag down all your numbers.

No, it is not an MFA!

It is an information site about a special interest with a community section. Let's say about a specific sport.

The community section is new and I also want to add a gallery and allow user to upload pictures to the gallery.

I'm concerned about users just going and see all the profiles, pictures etc. lowering my CTR.

And in additon I'm concerned about the percentage of pages with good content. The informative section has good content and make about 95% of the site until now.
But if more and more people join the community and a lot of pictures are uploaded then the percentage of the informative section will go down. Let's say to 10% of the whole site. I'm concernd that this will hurt my position in the serps.

But on the other hand some other people here, like the famous canadian, make a lot of money with communities. His CTR must be low, too?

what i did was use ypn for the picture galleries... on one site, the ecpm is nearly as good as adsense, because the ypn clicks pay 4x more than adsense does... just be sure and include plenty of keyword text on the gallery page.

if you can't get ypn, you may still be o.k. with adsense... since i replaced the adsense with ypn on the picture pages, i haven't seen a significant change in my average adsense epc... so the ctr shouldn't be a factor, but the gallery page design will have a huge effect on the ctr of those pages.

picture galleries can generate a lot of traffic from the search engines, but only if the pics have names that are relevant to your subject matter... image pages can also be used to drive qualified traffic to text pages, via relevant text links.

copyright on user pics is an issue, so at the minimum, make sure that your community tos is worded correctly.

My questions:

a) Is it allowed to put adsense also on these picture pages?
b) Will the 1000's of additional pages spoil my CTR and eCPM (a lot of people will click thru the pictures: next --> next --> next
c) Will these 1000's of additional pages spoil the position in the serps for the existing pages?
d) Would it be an idea to disallow google-bot (for search) but allow the media-bot?

a) Yes, absolutely no problem.
b) Impossible to say however you will probably earn more.
c) Not whatsoever, it may even make things better for you.
d) No, you want these images in search results.

Ensure every page has individual relevant titlebar and meta tag details and that your image "alt" tag is completed with relevant text to that image. Do not use generic text, it must be relevant and specific.

I have several 1,000+ page sites which are 95% widget images. Nearly all these pages rank #1 and, obviously, many people wanting to buy or view these widgets visit my sites and click the ads for retail or trade suppliers of those widgets.

OR you could simply use a slide show on one page..:)

picture pages never do well. after adding 1,000 pages, you'll just learn that lesson.

This is stating the obvious but I'll mention it anyway. When an image gallery runs to thousands of images, the storage space and, especially, the bandwidth requirements, can be considerable, so be sure to do some calculations for both, based on what you would expect the average jpeg file size to be. Don't overlook or underestimate that side of things. Good luck to you if you do proceed with it.

I, too, am thinking of adding a picture gallery to my site.... however I have a feeling the CTR will be small like my forum (around 1%). But even the little bit my forum makes is better than nothing.
Images and descriptions will be user-submitted, which might cause a problem with descriptions/keywords.

My question is similar to the OP's -- will 1000's of pages with a low CTR drag my earnings down?
Doesn't google favor sites with high CTRs? Smartpricing hit the ones with low CTRs?

picture pages never do well. after adding 1,000 pages, you'll just learn that lesson.

Fine, just leave me with mine and my earnings plus the extra 20,000 images I shall be adding over the next few years!

Generalise if you wish, stating specifics without the knowledge of a widget market is plain silly.

>>>Doesn't google favor sites with high CTRs? Smartpricing hit the ones with low CTRs?<<<

that is the million-dollar question... does low ctr indicate poor conversion rates for the advertiser?

There are picture galleries....and there are picture galleries.

It all depends on how you set things up. By and large, most photo upload programs I've come across aren't very SE friendly in that very little content is "created" during the upload process. Usually just a short caption and title of the photo - maybe some keywords if you are lucky. But regardless, not enough to really give you a big jump anywhere in the rankings.

I use PhotoPost - a great progam BTW - and while the pages are indexed they never, ever drive people to the site via Google search or Image Search.

Now....thats the automated gallery. The other option is to hand-make your own gallery - slow and painful as it is. This may not work for you since you want visitors to contribute photos, but if the photos are your own as in my case - by hand-making the galleries you can nearly make each large photo image come out as its own landing page for the Google SERPS.

I've had pretty good luck with this type of gallery, if you can get through the initial pain of making them. Around a 1.5 to 2% CTR that is paying quite well - with no dodgy stuff to try to get accidental clicks. Additionally, to help get "content" for the page - beyond a solid caption, title, ALT tags and the Page Title, I run dynamic ads served up from MySQL that have been targeted for the content of the photo (thus a photo of place "X" will serve up a ad for place "X") on the bottom of the page.

Finally, don't forget about putting navigation - lots of navigation links - into these large photo pages. It provides content - as well as helping make those large photo pages landing pages all by themselves.

My two cents

Jim

Fine, just leave me with mine and my earnings plus the extra 20,000 images I shall be adding over the next few years!

Generalise if you wish, stating specifics without the knowledge of a widget market is plain silly.

We have a gallery section on one of our sites, and it has about 15,000-20,000 photos, all of the same niche. On heavy days, we see about 90,000 users, requesting close to 80 images per second or about 2-5 million requests per day. Our gallery is very well layed out, and includes the "Next"/"Previous" links, as well as thumbnail pages, and thumbnails of the next 5 photos if you're on the "blown up" image page.

We'd be lucky to make $30 during a heavy day.

Photo_galleries_are_awful_for_CPC. CPM is where it's at :)

Chip-

nice traffic carguy! i ran your numbers on my best ecpm gallery site, which is about 80% pages with thumbnails... maybe half of my traffic is from google image search? a lot of it is from people stealing pics via hotlinking.

with ypn, i average 8,000 uniques/mo. at ~$80/mo... the site is there to drive traffic elsewhere, but if i had your 90,000 visitors, i'd be making $800 off of 'em?

i think that page design, content sources, and traffic sources can make a huge difference in the success of a picture gallery site... none of my content is user-generated, and most of it is tailored for seo.

i think that page design, content sources, and traffic sources can make a huge difference in the success of a picture gallery site... none of my content is user-generated, and most of it is tailored for seo.

I think I've seen these sites, at least the ones you tried to submit to a directory, that happens to have a public discussion area on submissions.

I'm not making a judgment here, but there is something else worth considering. The "seo" that danimal is talking about can be perceived as creating an MFA site, a deceptive site, a contentless site and so on, and these are some of the comments danimal received from reviewers.

In one sense such comments may not matter much (I mean you can't please everyone all of the time), but there IS a catch, and that is that one does run the risk of getting slapped by future changes in a) search algos, b) adsense changes, and c) adwords changes.

I'm not saying that all image bases sites are risky, but I am saying that image based sites that use adsense, could be seen as deceptive, MFA, or doorway pages can get you into a lot of trouble down the road.

That problem isn't limited to image sites of course.

I wouldn't do what danimal has done. Not my cup of tea but maybe others do, but I DO suspect that to make picture galleries monetize requires some efforts at deception and trickery, at least for many sites.

the seo that i am referring to is primarily this:
1) most importantly, using relevant keyword names for the pics and the alt tags, so that image searchers will be able to find the pics.
2) using appropriate keywords in the body of the html, title, alt text, etc., so that the search engine has information to rank the page with... afaik, it is not known exactly how important that info is for image searches.

labeling those mainstream seo techniques as "mfa" is of course silly, but to each his own.

if you can't use seo on your image site, it won't appear in the image search results... after all, how would google know how to rank a pic with an auto-generated name? or how often do users ever name their pics to reflect the content of the pic?

you want traffic from image search results, because there is very little competition there, and the traffic should be relevant, because it's the same keywords you are using in the body of the text.

aha, that's the way you all earn your money: picture galleries..

i tell you what: if i search for a widget on google and one of the first results is your highly optimized page with only a photo of a widget, adsense slapped on and no content, then i'd freak out! i tell it in-your-face: classic mfa, if you ask me.. seems to be standard practice as i'm astonished how many members seem to be involved in this dirty business.

moti, i don't understand why people put up a page with only one photo on it... for one thing, it takes too long to navigate thru constant page reloads every time that you want to see a new photo.

and without unique text content, the page could end up in the supplemental index... not an issue for image searches, but it's bad news with the main index.

you want ranking in the main index, because image search engines can tweak the framed pages in their search results... for instance, ypn does not display any javascript ads on the framed pages of it's image search results... and when will google image search stop displaying ypn javascript ads? image search is not an mfa-friendly environment, and neither is the supplemental index, for that matter.

photo galleries are a lot of work... they need content, which requires prep work, and there is a significant amount of server overhead... it's much easier for mfa'ers to simply put up text pages.

The problem being discussed here is far too generalised.

One site's image gallery can generate a lot of revenue simply because the images are relevant to the subject matter. My images all pertain to my specialised construction products. Visitors view them to see their country of origin, actual colours and validity for their projects whether large or small.

If my images and sites were not pertinent then just why do advertisers target these sites with their ads?

Someone else's images may be a catalogue of art, poster prints, birthday cards, tourist destinations, clothes, cars, architecture etc.

Most can be monetised if they are presented correctly to the visitor with relevant and factual information, however when a visitor is merely shopping around for the best price for a specific, branded or known product, then do not expect them to generate huge AdSense earnings since that site is then just "another price comparison site" for the surfer.

Unfortunate but true in this day and age, there is no loyalty when it comes to someone saving a perceived amount...whether the back-up service is there or the business is in existence in 6 months times is of no concern to Joe Public since another site will come along and offer similar "bargains".

Sheesh...I'm getting off this mad, mad world...

Unless you describe an image gallery page a conversation like this is almost worthless.

A page with just a single photo and no text at all could qualify, as could a page with an extensive caption describing the image and links to other relevant pages or sites.

One can be built fast and cheap if you aren't using your own images, the other can take years and cost thousands of dollars, or much much more.

Either one could be a valid site to display Adsense on, although on the first it might a little harder to get targeted ads to display, but you might be able to manage that by using good urls and image alt text.

aha, that's the way you all earn your money: picture galleries..

i tell you what: if i search for a widget on google and one of the first results is your highly optimized page with only a photo of a widget, adsense slapped on and no content, then i'd freak out! i tell it in-your-face: classic mfa, if you ask me.. seems to be standard practice as i'm astonished how many members seem to be involved in this dirty business.

That's a very offensive post, moTi. I happen to manage a couple of large (thousands of pictures) image galleries, but guess what? There isn't a single advert anywhere on either of them. They've been built purely for the fun of it, for myself and fellow enthusiasts to enjoy. Building them has entailed hundreds of hours of hard work, starting in the mid-1990s and still ongoing today, and from that day to this not a single advert has ever appeared on either site, and never will. But that's really none of your business, is it? So how about you take care of your own websites and leave us to manage ours as we see fit, and keep your sweeping, offensive generalisations to yourself.