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 -
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Google indexing only 1 page out of 2 similar pages made for different cities
We have created two category pages, in which we are showing products which could be delivered in separate cities. Both pages are related to cake delivery in that city. But out of these two category pages only 1 got indexed in google and other has not. Its been around 1 month but still only Bangalore category page got indexed. We have submitted sitemap and google is not giving any crawl error. We have also submitted for indexing from "Fetch as google" option in webmasters. www.winni.in/c/4/cakes (Indexed - Bangalore page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_blr_cakes.xml) 2. http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 (Not indexed - Hyderabad page - http://www.winni.in/sitemap/sitemap_hyd_cakes.xml) I tried searching for "hyderabad site:www.winni.in" in google but there also http://www.winni.in/hyderabad/cakes/c/4 this link is not coming, instead of this only www.winni.in/c/4/cakes is coming. Can anyone please let me know what could be the possible issue with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abhihan0 -
PDF or HTML Page?
One of our sales team members has created a 25 page word document as a topical page. The plan was to make this into an html page with a table of contents. My thoughts were why not make it a pdf? Is there any con to using a PDF vs an html page? If the PDF was properly optimized would it perform just as well? The goal is to have folks click back to our products and hopefully by after reading about how they work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Image Maps
Hey forum, I'm curious about Image Maps. Few things I'm not sure about: 1. Will the links be followed? If so, will Google respect rel="nofollow"? 2. Will the image be considered 1 image? (indexed as image, etc.) Or will each map segment be treated as a separate image? 3. Any other SEO pros\cons to consider when adding an image map to an existing page? Thanks, Corwin.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Is it allowed to have different alt on same image on different pages?
Hi, I have images that match several different keywords and I wondered if I can give them different alts based on the page that they are displayed or will Google be angry with me? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Deferred javascript loading
Hi! This follows on from my last question. I'm trying to improve the page load speed for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. Currently, Google rate the page speed of the GZ site at 91/100 – with the javascript being the only place where points are being deducated. The only problem is, the JS relates to the trustpilot widget, and social links at the bottom of the page – neither of which work when they are deferred. Normally, we would add the defer attribute to the script tags, but by doing so it waits until the page is fully loaded before executing the scripts. As both the js I mentioned (reviews and buttons) use the document.Write command, adding this would write the code off the page and out of placement from where they should be. Anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0