Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do I have to optimize every page on my site?
-
Hi guys I run my own photography webstie (www.hemeravisuals.co.uk Going through the process optimizing my page for seo. I have one question I have a few gallery pages with no text etc? Do I still have to optimize these ? Would it rank my site lower if they weren't optimized?
And how can i do this sucessfully with little text on these pages ( I have indepth text on these subjects on my services & pricing pages?
Kind Regards
Cam
-
Hi there! Yes, you've definitely received some great responses! If your question has been answered, please mark up to three responses as a "Good Answer" and mark this question answered. Thanks!!
Christy
-
Would just like to say a big thanks for everyones input here has gave me alot of food for thought and also alot more to do
haha
Thanks again !
-
I would optimize the pages that you want to drive traffic to for keywords that are naturally relevant to each page. Never stuff a page with keywords (use your gut to determine the right amount) and always write copy so that it is completely readable and not awkward for your visitors. I would also avoid creating multiple pages just for the sake of targeting similar keywords with no other purpose (e.g. you have a page that targets "red apple" and a page that targets "red apples"). I've seen sites get smacked by Google Panda for doing this.
Sites with poorly-written SEO copy seem spammy and will be an instant turn off to whoever's showed up at your virtual doorstep.
Pages such as Contact Us and About Us don't really need optimization per se. However, all pages should at least contain unique and relevant h1s, meta titles and descriptions. Also, always avoid duplicating text between pages. This helps your website be more search engine friendly. I find that the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Google's Webmaster Tools HTML Suggestions are great for diagnosing which pages on your site need these unique elements.
-
Some great answers people thanks very much Smart Cow what did you mean when you said
''That said there are always things to improve Have a look at H1 and H2 settings you have on the home page.'' What have I done wrong ?
Cheers Cam
-
Good Morning!
Google is about content, and SEO is more and more about marketing.
Optimizing is important of course, but even Matt Cutts said it wouldn't be worth your time to go back and optimize old pages that were not optimized. That being said, I personally feel that optimizing the gallery as far as the meta tags are concerned as was mentioned above is more than enough.
If you have the time to go back and optimize everything, it certainly will not hurt to do it. However, if you have limited resources, I think you are better off writing blog posts about images that are in your own gallery, developing your Google authorship, etc.
Google wants content. Show Google you are an Expert, Trustworthy, and an Authority (EAT) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2355230/google-search-quality-guidelines-now-reward-expertise-authority-trust
-
Generally, optimizing a page means that you are targeting a specific key term you want to rank for. While you might not see measurable "negative" SEO effects of having pages with no content, I believe that you could use those pages to target key terms. Images rank as well as pages. You can use image alt attributes and add some content to those pages which may help drive some traffic. I like to play safe rather than sorry. It takes a little bit of work, and you might not have keywords for those pages yet, but you could use the images as ranking tools.
-
There are many level to ensuring your site is optimised that is not just text on the page. Page load speed, page name and page bounce must all surely play a factor. This is a nice site that engages with nice images and not ruined by extra text to try an please a search engine.
For keyword content, keep your blog up-to-date with honest genuine content, maybe pointing to a gallery when you update the images.
As far as I can see SEO will become (is becoming) something that reflects good honest and engaging content rather than making sure you have scientifically optimised your site.
Show your passion for your subject and it will be rewarded with visitors interested in your service and products. Try to second guess and over optimise a site and you will be found out , maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually.
That said there are always things to improve Have a look at H1 and H2 settings you have on the home page.
Also notice at the top I did not say it was a quick site have a looks at speeding this up http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141126_61_VQT/ people may bounce away even before viewing your page whatever the great keywords you may have optimised with.
Just my 2 pennies worth, hope it helps
-
I see you got a answer from someone that knows more than me. I recommend that you take Kevin's advice, and apologize for my bad advice.
-
There are many ways to optimize gallery pages (optimize H tags, optimizing file size of images, adding short descriptions, good page titles, implementing proper tags on the image, good ux and so on). There is an excellent tutorial here. Good luck!
-
Disclaimer: I am definitely not a SEO expert, but i cannot see any reason for why you should get penalized for having a few gallery pages on your site. That would just give people another reason for doing "bad" SEO by using shady methods to get their gallery-pages and similar pages with no/minimal text to rank better.
-
Thanks very much ! I had wondered this and wasn't entirely sure how the page rank worked in terms of optimization on every page. As I have 4 Gallery Pages & 1 Home Page for the Galleries 'hemeravisuals.co.uk/galleries/weddings. But that makes sense really enjoying moz feeling i'm finally getting to grips with this SEO !
-
Yes, you can have unoptimized pages. They will naturally not get a very good pagerank, but as far as i know it does not hurt to have some pages with no text as long as you have enough content on the rest of your site.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0