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.
What is the point of having images clickable loading to their own page?
-
Hello,
Noticed a lot of sites, usually wordpress (seems to be the default) have the images in their posts clickable that load to their own page, showing just the image, usually a .jpg page. I know these pages seem to be easily indexed into google image search and can drive traffic to those specific pages...
My questions are...
1. What is the point of driving traffic to a page that is just the image, there are no links to other pages, no ads, nothing...
2. can you redirect these .jpg pages to the actual post page? I ask because on google image search, there are 3 links to click (website, image link, image page), when you click to view the image, it loads the .jpg page, why not have that .jpg redirect to the real content page that has ads and also has other links. Is this white-hat?
3. Do these pages with just images have any negative effect on optimization since they are just images, no content?
4. Can you monetize these .jpg pages?
5. What is the best practice? I understand there is value in traffic, but what is the point of image traffic if I can't monetize those pages?
-
I could see linking to an image file itself as useful if the image were larger and you wanted to display it outside of a paragraph of text. Many infographics could qualify for a page of their own. The site would still benefit from traffic and from authority.
-
Wasn't looking for services, just someone to connect with and bounce ideas around. Thanks for your responses!
-
Sorry, I do not provide SEO services/consulting. If you are looking for a SEO, you can search in the recommended companies section: http://moz.com/article/recommended
I only contribute here as a hobby and a way to learn more every day
-
Having a link in the image linking to it's own file does not help your image to get indexed faster or added to a sitemap, at least not that I know of.
In my blog, I don't have the images linking to their file and they are indexed just fine, plus added to the image sitemap that is being generated by "xml-sitemaps" automated script.
Having the image file redirecting to the page having the post is actually serving users with different content that what Google may see, hence the penalty of the image mismatch. If Google offers a link the the image, it should load the image. That's why they also offer link to the page or clicking the image links to the page where the image is. You can read more on the "Image Mismatch" penalty here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137
-
You've seen/read somewhere that redirecting an image from google image search to the actual page of content rather than just the .jpg page is not allowed? Can you share that info?
I guess to add to my question... it seems that having the images clickable and brought to their own .jpg page seems that those pages are able to be added to the image sitemap and easily indexed.
My concerns are being able to get all my images, lets say 10 images per 1000 word blog post, i want those 10 images to get indexed into google image search. How do you go about doing so? I thought making them clickable to their own .jpg page was making this happen quicker since I see it going on all the time with wordpress sites....
-
The "page" you see only the image is the image file itself, there's no page there, just the file.
Wordpress does that by default but you can simply change that default to other options they offer and it is "saved" as the default, like no link, link to another page, etc.
The only benefit of having the link to the image file is that usually images are scaled to fit into posts, and therefore someone may want to see the image in its full size, hence the link to the image file. There are also other ways to deal with that like lightboxes to display images.
You could redirect the image to the page where the image is, but that requires some coding (detecting from where your image is being requested, etc.). Doing that may also carry a penalty from Google (recently announced) called "Image mismatch".
There's no "best practice" here, the best is what you consider best for each image. Take the image scaling example I mentioned, say you post an infographic, perhaps the image is much larger than the size you have available, so it makes sense linking to the image file, so the user can see the infographic in its full size.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Image Audit: Getting a list of *ALL* Images on a Site?
Hello! We are doing an image optimization audit, and are therefore trying to find a way to get a list of all images on a site. Screaming Frog seems like a great place to start (as per this helpful article: https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-perform-an-image-optimization-audit), but unfortunately, it doesn't include images in CSS. 😞 Does the community have any ideas for how we try to otherwise get list of images? Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Do Page Anchors Affect SEO?
Hi everyone, I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long! I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong? The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Number of images on Google?
Hello here, In the past I was able to find out pretty easily how many images from my website are indexed by Google and inside the Google image search index. But as today looks like Google is not giving you any numbers, it just lists the indexed images. I use the advanced image search, by defining my domain name for the "site or domain" field: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search and then Google returns all the images coming from my website. Is there any way to know the actual number of images indexed? Any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau1 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0
