Devaluing certain content to push better content forward

[msphotography]

Hi all, I'm new to Moz, but hoping to learn a lot from it in hopes of growing my business. I have a pretty specific question and hope to get some feedback on how to proceed with some changes to my website. First off, I'm a landscape and travel photographer. My website is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com - you can see that the navigation quickly spreads out to different photo galleries based on location. So if a user was looking for photos from California, they would find galleries for Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, the Redwoods and San Francisco. At this point, there are probably 600-800 photos on my website. At last half of these are either older or just not quite up to par with the quality I'm starting to feel like I should produce. I've been contemplating dumbing down the galleries, and not having it break down so far. So instead of four sub-galleries of California, there would just be one California gallery. In some cases, where there are lots of good images in a location, I would probably keep the sub-galleries, but only if there were dozens of images to work with. In the description of each photo, the exact location is already mentioned, so I'm not sure there's a huge need for these sub-galleries except where there's still tons of good photos to work with.

I've been contemplating building a sort of search archive. Where the best of my photos would live in the main galleries, and if a user didn't find what they were looking for, they could go and search the archives for older photos. That way they're still around for licensing purposes, etc. while the best of the best are pushed to the front for those buying fine art prints, etc. These pages for these search archives would probably need to be de-valued somehow, so that the main galleries would be more important SEO-wise. So for the California galleries, four sub-galleries of perhaps 10 images each would become one main California gallery with perhaps 15 images. The other 25 images would be thrown in the search archive and could be searched by keyword.

The question I have - does this sound like a good plan, or will I really be killing my site when it comes to SEO by making such a large change? My end goal would be to push my better content to the front, while scaling back a lot of the excess. Hopefully I explained this question well. If not, I can try to elaborate further!

Thanks,

Mickey

[Toddfoster]

Hi Mickey,

I took a look at your site - first let me say you have some pretty great shots there!

But on to SEO. I think I understand what you're saying you want to do with the site. Really, this comes down to site architecture and the issue you are going to have is that a lot of your pages will be very photo-heavy, meaning you will have very little content to work with while simultaneously struggling against duplicate content penalties because you will have to rely on alt-tags to label your content.

For me, your best bet would be to institute several category pages to lead off your main page and have them showcase some text-based content. For example, writing a small bio (300-500 words) on the location and targeting geo-specific keywords (i.e. California photography). Create these pages for what you want to rank for. If you don't want too many words showing up on a page, you can institute an accordion design so users have to click certain blocks for the content to appear. This still allows search engines to crawl the content, however.

For other pages you don't want ranking, you can place a link leading from your category pages to follow-up pages which feature the images you are less fond of. You can do the same with your search archive. The end result would be something like:

Home Page

-> Category Page -> Search Archive/Secondary Photos
-> Category Page -> Search Archive/Secondary Photos
-> Category Page -> Search Archive/Secondary Photos

This will place your premium content directly in front of your visitors and will help with ranking after you place textual content on the pages. It also does not involve any "de-valuing" of content on your site - just moves in the positive direction.

Hope this helps with your question and let me know if you need any further clarification.

Best of luck!

Rob

[msphotography]

Thanks Rob! That helps a lot. I've been considering beefing up copy content on some of the pages (especially the gallery pages). This kind of gives me a direction to move towards. Devaluing was probably a bad word to use. I mainly just wanted the better content pushed forward without having to actually delete anything. Thanks for the help and also the kind comments on the photography!

Mickey