Am I hurting my SEO by...

Hi everyone -

I use SmugMug for my website and I've been working diligently to optimize it for search engines. Ive added keywords and descriptions to all of my images which also have relevant filenames. Ive added keywords and descriptions for all my pages, and making sure to hit my main keywords in blocks of text as often as possible (not spamming, just careful wording). Ive also gone and submitted my site to yahoo/dmoz directories as well.

So, after Ive done all of this I realized none of this may matter as I could have a bigger problem. Although you could never get to it by clicking any links on my site, I have a LOT of personal images in various galleries that have nothing to do with the content of my "main" site that are "hidden" from the public. Not exactly the most secure way to keep my personal images private, but I dont really care about that so if someone "broke in" it wouldnt be bad, I just dont want them displayed right away for customers.

Back to the point - lets say, for example, if www.northerncaptures.c​om were my main site but at www.northerncaptures.c​om/personalpictures I had 10 galleries unrelated to the main site, how bad is this from an SEO perspective?

I'm not sure how bad it is, but there are ways to keep the (legit) search engines out of web pages that you don't want showing up on searches:
http://www.google.com …in/answer.py?an​swer=93710

make a robots.txt file and upload it to the webroot directory.
put this in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /personalpictures

I hope this helps.

Dave G wrote in post #12547744
make a robots.txt file and upload it to the webroot directory.
put this in it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /personalpictures

I hope this helps.

I don't think you can edit your 'robots.txt' on a Smugmug site.

Oh sorry I didn't know that.
Another way is to put <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the non public pages.

Dave G wrote in post #12547855
Oh sorry I didn't know that.
Another way is to put <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the non public pages.

Again, not sure if you can add that on a specific gallery on Smugmug.

You can set up password-protected gallery(s). This will prevent the search engines indexing a particular section.

Sorry I have never used Smugmug, I use my own hosting. I hope I haven't cluttered up the thread with useless answers.

Dave

Dave G wrote in post #12547944
Sorry I have never used Smugmug, I use my own hosting. I hope I haven't cluttered up the thread with useless answers.

Dave

I have my own domain/hosting too, so I can edit everything (and more). I also have a Smugmug site, so I'm learning what you can and what you can't do...LOL!

Hikin Mike wrote in post #12547998
I have my own domain/hosting too, so I can edit everything (and more).

Everything and more.. Wow!

http://www.smugmug.com​/help/private-search-island

however, I have no idea on the effect of SEO...

It shouldn't hurt much, if at all.

Keyword density shouldn't be effected and the robots wont be finding it anyways.

Thanks guys - Ill just make sure Ive got them flagged to be skipped by Googlebot, as some others have mentioned this should solve any potential issues.

Thanks for your input!

If there is no reference anywhere on the web to the 'personalpictures' directory (and sub directories), Google probably wont find it. Google doesn't go about by guessing directory names on random websites. It follows links it finds on web pages.