Adult SEO Q
 

When i first started my site a year ago.. i was trying to optimize each page(either a gallery or video) for a unique key phrase each. This never worked good because there just isn't enough page content to rank a page like that.

I started using those pages to point to tag\category pages using the key phrases, and that is working way better and is pushing some ranking.

My question is regarding all those pages I optimized over the years that will never rank for anything. Should I "un-optimize" them so there is no internal kw competition with my category pages? And use them only to link with the kw phrase.

Thx

Why aren't you adding SEO content (description) to the landing pages (gallery or video)?

Surely that's the content with most relevant user content on your site? If so should optimise.

Yes I have been hand writing descriptions for every gallery that focuses on the keyphrase targeted as well as meta. Only so much on page text content for a small gallery or video. A few sentences\paragraph. Those pages just never had much luck ranking for anything. Keyword rankings started working better on the tag pages when i would link to them with the anchors of the kws targetted in the content pages.

This article pretty much sums it all up.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-cannibalization/

So basically you're pointing internal links from galleries/videos to categories/tags? If that's the case you should be in the clear if you've got more than just anchor text on the page, if not then you should use canonical tags.

In general, it would be a bad idea to roll back on all the optimization. More often than not it would have a negative impact on your SEO. It's a bit of a complicated issue depending on how big your collection of videos and galleries is. Categories and tags should be your primary concern, they're usually the ones pulling in the traffic, while the content itself could rank for specific long-tail keywords or variations based on model names, types of scenes, branded titles, etc.

With all that being said, it's hard to give you a piece of solid advice without deeper insight into your site.

Those pages not ranking even if you think they are optimized are probably suffering from thin content "penalty". Lack of useful text, Google will see a bad page because it is not giving any value to the visitors.

Like everyone else mentioned, if you are having issues with keyword cannibalism, simply use canonical URLs.
I would also work on content itself, better and clearer video and image content and update your textual content etc.

My advice is not to remove internal links towards tags and categories pages. But you can play around with anchors a little or similar.

Read about how silos work, and consider each of your categories to be it's own silo. Link them appropriately and it will help.