Occasionally, as a luxury travel writer, I get comments on photo attachment pages for my site, Somewhere Luxurious. I had been deleting the spam comments without a second thought, until I really thought about why people were commenting on those pages in the first place. The attachment pages contained only a single photo and a title, so they were of no real value to most of my readers.
At first, I thought that I would figure out how to add a description to the photos. At least then my readers will get a photo and a description of it if they happened to wander onto the index page. The descriptive information, however, appeared on the main page for the post. I would literally double my work if I rewrote the copy from the main page and somehow got it to show up on the attachment page. That wouldn’t work. I also didn’t want to duplicate my content.
So, I decided to figure out how to keep the attachment pages from being accessed in the first place. Luckily, I realized that I already had a plug-in for that. I only needed to change a couple of settings to keep my readers from being pointed to my attachment pages. Through my research, I learned that it’s best that all pages have as much content as possible, for the readers’ benefit and also to avoid Google penalties. When attachment pages are indexed the search engines can pick up hundreds of thin pages on the site. Although some people may argue (just as I thought) that it is good for the search engines to index as many pages for a site as possible, I now firmly believe that these pages should be as content rich as possible. I found some neat tools for optimizing a travel site (or any site). There are great tools that anyone could use.
Certainly, working as a luxury travel writer is about more than just writing.
Claudine has been published in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, Hotel Chatter, and other distinguished publications.
She has a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications and a master's degree in Information Design and Communications.
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