During the Q&A portion of a Google Search Central Office Hours Hangout, John Mueller was asked a question about portfolio style sites with thumbnail images, and full size image pages.
These thumbnails are used as the navigation, and they are approximately 10-30 thumbnails displayed in a gallery-type layout.
They expand to full size when clicked, depending on the CMS plugin that’s used.
The full size image may or may not be included in the actual page HTML code.
One example the SEO professional shared was having a kitchen url showing a portfolio.
The plugin features a function where you can load “kitchen?image=123,” and this will load exactly the same page.
However, the JavaScript code will open a full size version of this image.
Their question was whether or not John would advise that they consider each image as having its own separate unique page and listing it in a sitemap. Or, should they canonicalize all of these images to the main kitchen page, and list only the main kitchen URL in the sitemap, because in reality, there is only one HTML page there.
John answered that, in general, he would treat these as unique pages.
When the page is loaded and fully rendered in the browser, and it shows something unique, then it’s considered a unique page, even if that’s entirely accomplished by using JavaScript.
They do process JavaScript, and this is something that you can test by using the Inspect URL tool in Google Search Console.
By doing this, you can go in and see exactly what Google saw when they crawled the page.
John also expounded on the fact that, if you care about image search, you definitely want to have a separate image landing page.
He also added that for image search, when you have a separate image page with some smaller information displayed next to that image, it’s really useful.
This is something that Google systems can recognize as being a good image landing page.
It doesn’t matter if you generate the page with JavaScript or with static HTML on the back end. This implementation is up to you.
But, having a unique image landing page is something that does help when it comes to image search.
Otherwise, if you just have a page that’s basically a portfolio of 30 images, and someone was actually doing a search for a query for that landing page, it’s hard for Google to say that the page has the information you need because of all these images.
The thing about image search is it works entirely separate from normal web search, and not every site cares about ranking in image search.
It is also not at all the case that if you perform well in image search, that you will have better performance in web search. Both of them are completely unrelated.
This happens at approximately the 25:06 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John 25:06
A question regarding images.
I have portfolio style sites with pages each showing 10 to 30 thumbnails displayed in a gallery. And in full size when clicked, depending on the CMS plugin used, the full size image is or is not included in the page HTML. So for instance, we have a kitchen URL showing a portfolio. The plugin has a feature that you can load kitchen, question mark, image equals 123, and it will load exactly the same page.
But JavaScript will open a full size version of the image, providing a sort of unique URL for a page for that image. In reality, there is only one page containing the entire image set and it’s set. It’s only JavaScript that is kind of making that work.
Do you advise on considering each image having its own page and listing it in a sitemap? Or should I canonicalize them all to the main kitchen page and list only kitchen in the sitemap as in reality, there’s only one HTML page there?
John 26:14
So in general, I would treat these as unique pages. If when the page is loaded and rendered in the browser, it shows something unique, then it’s a unique page, even if that’s done with JavaScript.
So we do process JavaScript, you can test that with the Inspect URL tool, and you can double check to see what Google has actually seen. The one place where I would tend to say it’s useful having a separate image landing page is if you care about image search.
And for image search, having having something like a clean landing page where when a user enters a URL, they land on a page that has the image front and center maybe has some additional information for that image on the side, that is really useful, because it’s, it’s something that our systems can recognize as being a good image landing page.
And whether or not you generate that with JavaScript, or with the static HTML on the backend, that’s more up to you. But essentially, kind of the aspect of having a unique image landing page is something that really helps when it comes to image search.
Because otherwise, if we just have this portfolio page with like, 30 small thumbnails on it, and someone was searching for an image, it’s hard for us to say, well, you’ll find the information you need on this big landing page with lots of images on it.
Because chances are the image is somewhere where they don’t see it offhand. And they feel kind of confused if we sent them there after searching for that image. The thing with image search is that it works kind of separate from normal web search, and not all sites care about it. It’s not the case that if you have kind of good performance and image search, that you will have better performance in web search.
You can essentially treat these as separate things. And from that point of view, if you only care about web search, if you don’t really need these images to be visible in image search, then this might not even be something that you need to care about. So I think those are kind of the different options there.
