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I'm interested in making a custom post type in which every post is a single image. My question is, WordPress creates a page for each post, and since it won't have any words, will it hurt the page rank of the website?

If this question isn't related to here, I'd love to know where i can ask this question.

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Generally those who SPAM (would count as a "bad site") add lots of textual content because Google needs that to rank things. Having a site that is entirely image based will not mark you as a bad site or a good site. But unless you work to optimize it in some way then it likely won't rank for much simply because Google won't know what to rank it for.

A common misconception is that Good Site = Ranks in Google and Bad Site = Does not Rank. This is not always the case, there are lots of good sites that are buried in Google not because Google thinks they are bad, but because it doesn't know what to rank them for, among other things.

In terms of image only sites, Flickr is a huge site that is basically just images and I see them rank for tons of keywords. Thats a long response to say, an image only site will pose different challenges then a text based site, but it can still do well in the SERPs.

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Search engines rank web pages, not websites. So those pages may not rank well due to lack of keywords but they won't drag down your site as a whole. (FYI, it's possible for those pages to rank well if they get quality links pointing to them. They then can even help the rest of your pages to rank we'll through internal linking so if these images are any good this may actually help your site).

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  • This will be the entire site though... it's all image based – eric.itzhak Mar 20 '12 at 17:47
  • wont the site count as bad because it dosen't really have content – eric.itzhak Mar 20 '12 at 17:50
  • Not really each page is ranked individually, if you get relevant back links dofollow they'll rank even better. But if the photos and meta information is unique you can still rank. – Anagio Mar 20 '12 at 18:03
  • I believe that post-Panda Google does consider the overall quality of the domain as one of the ranking signals. Example, this post where they talk about reducing rankings for "low-quality sites" – joshuahedlund Apr 17 '12 at 20:05
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You should install WordPress SEO by Yoast, setup a default Title, and Description so that the pages with only an image still have the minimal amount of content preferred by the search engines to try and decide where your pages will rank. You can also set an alt attribute for your images

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  • And if that will be the entire site? only pages of images will it be counted as a good site? – eric.itzhak Mar 20 '12 at 18:02
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A single short post = no

Lots of short posts = yes

The negative impact depends on the percentage of poor pages your site has to actual good ones. If you site is full of pages with little (or dup) content you failed at SEO.

If you have one or two posts/pages on a site, don't worry. Sometimes all you need is a paragraph or two to get your message out.

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There's a fairly common class of sites where every post is essentially just an image: webcomics. Given that those sites, on the whole, don't seem to have any fundamental SEO problem, it obviously is possible for sites consisting of just one image per page to rank just fine.

Here are a few tips to help search engines index your pages better:

  • Do your pictures contain text? If yes, definitely do transcribe it into the alt attribute of the <img> tag (or into a separate transcript elsewhere on the page if you prefer). This is not just for SEO, but for usability: it lets people find your images when they search for text in them. Even if your images don't contain text, you may still want to describe them in the alt text.

  • Give your posts meaningful titles. Even if you don't want any title text showing on the page itself, at least make sure the HTML <title> accurately describes the post. You may also want to set it as the title attribute of the <img> tag itself, especially on index pages showing multiple posts together.

  • Choose meaningful filenames for the images to help them show up in image search. Google recommends this in their image publishing guidelines, and it's sensible practice in any case. Also consider making the post URLs themselves descriptive. (Look at the URL of this page for one way to do that.)

  • <meta> keyword and description tags may be useful in such cases. Certainly it shouldn't hurt to provide your pages with meaningful descriptions. Remember that Google wants something to show as the "snippet" on its results pages; they may use your meta description for that, although they won't always do so.

  • Links, links, links! Not only are incoming links important for PageRank, but Google will also count keywords appearing in link anchor text. (In fact, they seem to assign them a remarkably high weight; that's how Google bombing can work.)

  • Even if you don't want to provide any additional text in your image posts, consider allowing your users to do so by posting comments. As long as the comments are relevant, they'll provide useful text for search engines to index. Alternatively, a separate "forum" section for discussion can also work, at least as long as you encourage backlinks from the forum to the original posts.

Also, here are some external resources for further information:

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