Why are my blog slideshow images not indexed?

[theoHP]

I'm managing a design blog hosted on WordPress. Each "design project" article includes a slideshow with additional images (and captions) for the project - these are images and text not found in the article itself.

Every slide has the same page path as the article, but a different query param at the end. So if the article is /article the first slide would be /article?slide=1 for example.

I'm having two issues:

1. The slideshow images don't seem to be getting indexed.
2. Screaming Frog reports duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for each slideshow page (same meta as article).

I want to do what's best overall from an SEO perspective. Having the slideshow images show in Google image search is a must. And having the captions indexed might help too? But I want the Google image results linking to the article and not the individual slideshow pages. And I don't want duplicate meta issues.

What's the best thing to do? Submit a sitemap that lists both article and slideshow images? "Rel canonical" the param'd slideshow urls to the base article url (not sure this makes total sense, since slide content is different from the article)? Get rid of slideshow altogether and put images in body? Some combo of these?

Hopefully this makes sense. Any thoughts appreciated!

[theoHP]

I think I'll try an Wordpress image sitemap plugin. Just unsure if I should also no-index the slideshow pages, since duplicate meta might be a problem...

[Andy.Drinkwater]

The problem that I have found with this in the past is that Google sees the whole page and not the images. I found this to be more of a limit of Wordpress.

However, you could use an image sitemap and see if you can get them indexed that way?

-Andy

[theoHP]

Thanks for the thorough answer, Andy. Why wouldn't you suggest trying to get slideshow images indexed? For us, the slideshow images are high quality, unique visual assets.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

It sounds like there are a number of issues going on here and it's quite hard to envisage everything.

Having captions indexed as snippets requires the page to be setup in such a way that Google can use them. But remember that in terms of what Google shows, they will deliver what they thing bets suits the search query.

In terms of images being indexed, have you thought about having an image sitemap, or having them included in this? However, I wouldn't be setting a canonical from slideshows to base pages as this sounds like it could cause you a load of headaches.

Duplication is hard to assess as there could be a number of reasons from this, including incorrectly set canonical tags, indexed pages or other semi-technical issues.

Personally, I wouldn't be looking at slideshow images as something to be indexed, but I would be using some of these images in the page itself. This is just what I have found in the past.

-Andy