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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages.
Hello, My last site crawl shows over 700 404 errors all with void(0 added to the ends of my posts/pages. I have contacted my theme company but not sure what could have done this. Any ideas? The original posts/pages are still correct and working it just looks like it did duplicates and added void(0 to the end of each post/page. Questions: There is no way to undo this correct? Do I have to do a redirect on each of these? Will this hurt my rankings and domain authority? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Wade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neverenoughmusic.com0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site
We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone2 -
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 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
When removing a product page from an ecommerce site?
What is the best practice for removing a product page from an Ecommerce site? If a 301 is not available and the page is already crawled by the search engine A. block it out in the robot.txt B. let it 404
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0