Site health impact on individual pages ranking?

[seoisgreat]

How much does a websites overall site health impact the ranking of individual pages? If I for example have optimized the services pages but the site has 75+ pages with missing H1´s, meta descriptions, alt text, broken links etc, does that have an impact on the optimized pages?

 

[djbaxter]

That depends on what's missing.

These won't directly affect your ranking:

• missing H1´s
• missing meta descriptions
• missing alt text

These may affect your ranking:

• broken links - if they are internal links they can mess up crawling
• broken links (incoming) also might affect your ranking if there are a large number of those, but there's not much you can do about that
• broken links to external pages possibly but probably not
• "etc" would depend on what you mean by "etc"

Either way, for other reasons not the least of which is user experience and accessibility, errors like that should be fixed.

 

[Cherie Dickey]

I agree. I think the focus is less about on page SEO best practices for on page optimization (though it's important to stay on top of those things), and more about the quality of the content that's on those pages.

Broken links in general are a sign that the site is not maintained, and it's also a terrible user experience. Other "etc" things that harm user experience, or the overall "usefulness" of the page would also harm the overall site's health. You don't want to have pages just to have pages on the site, if that makes sense.