How do you properly SEO-tag an app that is only a catalogue of images?

Question

I am making a little helper app that mostly links a lot of graphs and images. There is also some text explaining a couple of things, but more importantly that text will probably never (or very rarely) change. The graphs however change every couple of minutes, or in some cases every single minute. But when Google crawls my page, it will always find the same exact content, because the URL's of the graphs stay the same.

The images aren't mine, so I don't have control over the URL, they are NASA's public domain images.

Would changing the URL's by adding unnecessary GET parameters at the end do more good or more bad in this case?

Answer 1

By and large not of benefit to you either way. Trying to SEO-optimise that particular example is like trying to wash garbage, no matter what you do it will still be garbage (I realise it may seem upsetting the comparison but read on).

Your site by your own admission won't have any substantial unique content and is in fact displaying most of its content from another site (and a high authority site at that being NASA). This sort of site will never rank high on Google as it will be detected that all of the images are coming from a different site so they will be discounted, and as you say there is some text explaining things but from the sound of it the text is not a substantial content aspect of the page.

Now if you where publishing your own comments and evaluations of given images and simply hot linking the images in for aesthetic and informational purposes it would be different but given the whole purpose of the site is to display someone else's work, no matter your motives or how helpful it may seem, it will never rank as highly or even close to as high as the high authority site the images came from.