Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial by Erik.

Search Engine Optimized Alt Text in WordPress Dave thanks for this excellent answer.

What I gather after reading your response is that from an SEO standpoint even this 301 redirect situation affecting a couple thousand site wide links isn’t dealing with that much PR impact to begin with.

But I guess it is good to do anyway from what you write, and I will keep an eye out for a way to eventually eliminate those image links in a (hopefully) relatively painless manner (needless to say I have set the WP uploader image attachment to “None” for all future photo uploads!).

But perhaps the bigger benefit concerns the accumulation of those low-content image pages and being seen as a content farm.

If my site has 10,000 pages indexed, and 2,000 are these low quality image attachment pages, that seems like it is a pretty significant chunk. Or maybe I am wrong and that % of weak pages is not so negative in Google’s view.

I am hoping this 301 redirect solution will positively impact that situation (?), but I guess I don’t completely understand this aspect either–ie, whether the sheer existence of these image pages (even with the 301 redirect on them) will still cause Google to view me as having a lot of low-quality, low-content pages associated with my site, and possibly getting me a penalty as a result. Hmm.

I also found your comments on external 301 redirects relevant. I moved my domain 2 years ago and still have a redirect set up from that original domain. I am still not sure whether I should leave this redirect up in perpetuity or someday shut down the original domain. Another thing to ponder I guess! :)

Thanks again,

Erik