Yes, and completely ignore Google's advice to write unique meta descriptions that accurately describes the content of the page.
Personally I think that all these Smugmug generated meta descriptions and keywords is a bug in Smugmug.
Actually it should not be nessesary for anyone to put a feature request for any official SEO advice from Google.
I give up now - I have realized that Smugmug will not be SEO-friendly in the near future.
Hi Allen, maybe I'm not clear? I'm advocating using the site owner's words of choice for pages like /keyword pages or /date pages or /popular pages.
we have unique descriptions available for every gallery.
None if this is using SmugMug's words, it's using the owner's words.
I have realized that Smugmug will not be SEO-friendly in the near future.
Hm.... unique page titles in galleries - NiceNames, NiceNames for photos, making it easy to add homepage meta description, and more... we've drastically improved Google juice for our customers.
Can you help us to be even better? We really want to know.
Hm.... unique page titles in galleries - NiceNames, NiceNames for photos, making it easy to add homepage meta description, and more... we've drastically improved Google juice for our customers.
Can you help us to be even better? We really want to know.
Look in your Google Webmaster tools. Still lots of duplicate page titles and meta descriptions - only people who had a custom account og those who followed your advice to add a site title have benefitted from this. Remember it is not more than a few months ago that you denied any problems having the same page title on every page. Photos are still named 3547128-zpQsW.jpg - only path to photos is changed - you mention in the new Smugmug SEO guide that "Image names like wedding-cake.jpg trump IMG2031.jpg" ?????. You are about to retire single image pages - the only pages that do have a small succes rate in Google Imahe search - Unless you do as in your famouos "firescape" example - a empty gallery with an HTML embedded photo . Google's organic search do have 20+ parameters - some of them not public and some of them published on the Google webmaster pages - Smulmug do not follow most of those guidelines - To mention a few more:
Meta data,
One URL per image
Navigation (HTML + XML Sitemap)
Anchor text
Use of heading tags
Image file names
Quality content
Duplicate versions of the same page.
You have been told about these issues countless number of times by countless number of frustrated Smugmug users during the last few years - not much have happend.
Look in your Google Webmaster tools. Still lots of duplicate page titles and meta descriptions - only people who had a custom account og those who followed your advice to add a site title have benefitted from this. Remember it is not more than a few months ago that you denied any problems having the same page title on every page. Photos are still named 3547128-zpQsW.jpg - only path to photos is changed - you mention in the new Smugmug SEO guide that "Image names like wedding-cake.jpg trump IMG2031.jpg" ?????. You are about to retire single image pages - the only pages that do have a small succes rate in Google Imahe search - Unless you do as in your famouos "firescape" example - a empty gallery with an HTML embedded photo . Google's organic search do have 20+ parameters - some of them not public and some of them published on the Google webmaster pages - Smulmug do not follow most of those guidelines - To mention a few more:
Meta data,
One URL per image
Navigation (HTML + XML Sitemap)
Anchor text
Use of heading tags
Image file names
Quality content
Duplicate versions of the same page.
You have been told about these issues countless number of times by countless number of frustrated Smugmug users during the last few years - not much have happend.
So, yes, I give up.
Hey LichtenHansen,
Thanks for the passionate feedback. I asked an SEO consultant we trust to sort through this to make some decisions about how to prioritize our next steps, because we hear so many conflicting things from people like you whom we respect.
We have this little dilemma that we're very close to Google and often ask about things the SEO community is so charged about, and he shakes his head and says, "I know, but don't bother with that. Trust us when we say we don't take it into account." But we don't feel we can go public with it until Google makes an official statement, like they finally did with meta keywords.
Anyway, I know you have lots of great things to contribute and really what I'm looking for is a prioritized list, where we can pick off the things that give the biggest return for our engineering effort. So I asked our SEO consultant to jump into the discussion and I'll be following it closely.
Yes, and completely ignore Google's advice to write unique meta descriptions that accurately describes the content of the page.
Personally I think that all these Smugmug generated meta descriptions and keywords is a bug in Smugmug.
Actually it should not be nessesary for anyone to put a feature request for any official SEO advice from Google.
I give up now - I have realized that Smugmug will not be SEO-friendly in the near future.
I agree that Smugmug SEO has been awful in the past but they've come a long way.
You CAN write unique meta-descriptions for most pages. What you cannot do is leave it empty otherwise SM takes over automatically. Meta-description does not improve ranking but does give info to Search Engines (SE) and can improve clickthrough because it's used on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and user are more likely to click if they read something relevent to their search. I build my site so there's no need for additionnal text on the page for a cleaner look and less useless blah blah. But here at SM, if you don't put text in the description, SM takes over and it shows on the SERP.
You could say it's more about design and branding (sort-of) than SEO. It's actually quite minor but I don't understand why Smugmug made all those changes and left that out.
There's a lot of SEO stuff that isn't that important, like multiple URL for one image. Google is smart enough weed out the excess. There's room for improvment, like a site map.
These are acutally done, but there are some performance issues we're trying to wrassle - The Google is merciless, don't ya know! Hopefully we can get 'em live, without impacting any of our awesome speed.
(singleImage)
Is that true? I would welcome that.
yes, one day....can't say when thought..... that's why we just did improvements to lightbox view, showing keywords and comments there.
Thanks for the passionate feedback. I asked an SEO consultant we trust to sort through this to make some decisions about how to prioritize our next steps, because we hear so many conflicting things from people like you whom we respect.
Just read the official guidelines from Google. Smugmug is not following about 70% of the "SEO starter guide for webmasters".
We have this little dilemma that we're very close to Google and often ask about things the SEO community is so charged about, and he shakes his head and says, "I know, but don't bother with that. Trust us when we say we don't take it into account." But we don't feel we can go public with it until Google makes an official statement, like they finally did with meta keywords.
I find it a bit odd that you mention meta keywords. If they are not any good for anything - then why keep adding them and anoying so many Smugmug users with these spam keyword of yours?
Same thing with the Smugmug spam meta description.
Anyway, I know you have lots of great things to contribute and really what I'm looking for is a prioritized list, where we can pick off the things that give the biggest return for our engineering effort. So I asked our SEO consultant to jump into the discussion and I'll be following it closely.
I'm looking forward very much to this one. Without any hope though - You have to be much, much better than you are today.
Lots of peopple have begged for better SEO, Some have kindly suggested or recommended SEO improvements. Some have yelled and some have left Smugmug.
As I have said before, I'll be glad to help and so would lots of other Smugmug users - if you would taKe this serious.
If you are really interested in these SEO matters, I'll start by suggesting you to look at a huge Smugmug SEO problem - duplicate pages.
I have about 500 photos - Google have indexed more than 7000 pages and they are all more or less invisible in organic searches.
Google have recently intensified their effort to minimize this problem, published: Duplicate content and added Parameter Handling tool to their webmaster tools.
Are you at Smugmug going to anything about this?
Are you going to suggest which parameters we should add?
Or - as usual - keep silent or deny the existance of the problem?
As I said before: I give up - at least until you take SEO serious.
I find it a bit odd that you mention meta keywords. If they are not any good for anything - then why keep adding them and anoying so many Smugmug users with these spam keyword of yours?
We're doing something about this, stay tuned. And, thanks for the passionate prodding!
Or - as usual - keep silent or deny the existance of the problem?
This is just crazy. We're not silent about SEO at all, we've been shouting about it I've been posting to you but you're ignoring the stuff we are doing, which ruins a lot of the passionate arguments you are trying to make.
We're going to properly improve our meta description for date, popular and keyword pages, too. That's in testing right now.
We take all this input -very- seriously - including yours.
We're gonna try and remove this for your pages, it'll be on our public pages but we don't need 'em on your pages. Stay tuned, we're serious about improving as much as we can, including stuff like this!
This is just crazy. We're not silent about SEO at all, we've been shouting about it I've been posting to you but you're ignoring the stuff we are doing, which ruins a lot of the passionate arguments you are trying to make..
We are both crazy. We have also cried for unique page titles for years before you reacted.
We're going to properly improve our meta description for date, popular and keyword pages, too. That's in testing right now.
We take all this input -very- seriously - including yours.
Thanks a lot for your positive attitude.
What is really impotant here is that the canonical URL's will get the right meta description.
In my opinion the most important pages are: homepage, category, subcategory, gallery and single image pages.
The Google definition of a good meta description is:
Quoted from Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy
content analysis section that'll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times
I hope you will provide us with a tool that will give us possibility to acomplish this goal.
right now when I call up my website on google, this is the entry that appears:
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler - 3:50pm
var ssConfig = { AlbumID: '3505170', AlbumKey: 'f3ta9', newWindow: 'false', transparent: 'true', ...
I would like it to say
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Can someone please tell me how to do this? I think it has something to do with my bio page but I'm not sure what to do. Thanks
right now when I call up my website on google, this is the entry that appears:
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler - 3:50pm
var ssConfig = { AlbumID: '3505170', AlbumKey: 'f3ta9', newWindow: 'false', transparent: 'true', ...
I would like it to say
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Can someone please tell me how to do this? I think it has something to do with my bio page but I'm not sure what to do. Thanks
Put this in the meta box in your control panel, settings tab:
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Then, give Google some time to re-index your meta info.
We announced this in release notes: You'll want to subscribe to our Release Notes blog, so that you don't miss a single update from SmugMug http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/ at the bottom, there's a link for Entries (RSS) - put that in your favorite feed reader.
Put this in the meta box in your control panel, settings tab:
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Then, give Google some time to re-index your meta info.
We announced this in release notes: You'll want to subscribe to our Release Notes blog, so that you don't miss a single update from SmugMug http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/ at the bottom, there's a link for Entries (RSS) - put that in your favorite feed reader.
Thank you Andy. I just recently signed up to get email reminders about release notes.
But you know me, I do have one suggestion. Can you change the entry box for this to a multi-line box? I find it rather difficult to maintain an entry in a single line box that doesn't display the maximum number of characters.
Yes, I did revert to a text editor and copy/paste, but that really shouldn't be necessary in today's UIs.
--- Denise
Fixed, it's bigger, and easier to type in your meta description now
SmugMug and Site Maps
Saw some comments about SmugMug and sitemaps. This is something I had mentioned to them as well for adding another level of SEO-friendliness to their websites, but I do want to point out that they are not entirely essential for SmugMug sites at this point. I think the main benefit of site maps are so that Google can find and index all of your site's content quickly and easily, which is already being done for SmugMug sites based on its clean navigation system and keyword tagging (if you are using that feature). Basically the links that SmugMug sites automatically create to its own pages allows Google to find your content without sitemaps. I saw results for this by doing a site: search for a couple fo SmugMug sites in Google and saw a tremendous amount of pages being returned. In my opinion, sitemaps for SmugMug is a nice-to-have for future release but I can be patient.
Comments
we have unique descriptions available for every gallery.
None if this is using SmugMug's words, it's using the owner's words.
Am I missing something?
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Can you help us to be even better? We really want to know.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Look in your Google Webmaster tools. Still lots of duplicate page titles and meta descriptions - only people who had a custom account og those who followed your advice to add a site title have benefitted from this. Remember it is not more than a few months ago that you denied any problems having the same page title on every page. Photos are still named 3547128-zpQsW.jpg - only path to photos is changed - you mention in the new Smugmug SEO guide that "Image names like wedding-cake.jpg trump IMG2031.jpg" ?????.
You are about to retire single image pages - the only pages that do have a small succes rate in Google Imahe search - Unless you do as in your famouos "firescape" example - a empty gallery with an HTML embedded photo .
Google's organic search do have 20+ parameters - some of them not public and some of them published on the Google webmaster pages - Smulmug do not follow most of those guidelines - To mention a few more:
Meta data,
One URL per image
Navigation (HTML + XML Sitemap)
Anchor text
Use of heading tags
Image file names
Quality content
Duplicate versions of the same page.
You have been told about these issues countless number of times by countless number of frustrated Smugmug users during the last few years - not much have happend.
So, yes, I give up.
Panoramio: Spectacular photos on Google Earth
Google: Allan Hansen - fotograf og IT-nørd
Blogs: Photo and SEO news by LichtenHansen, Allan Hansen foto nyheder, Antarctica Travel
Homepage: Fotograf Allan Hansen, Unusual wildlife photos
Thanks for the passionate feedback. I asked an SEO consultant we trust to sort through this to make some decisions about how to prioritize our next steps, because we hear so many conflicting things from people like you whom we respect.
We have this little dilemma that we're very close to Google and often ask about things the SEO community is so charged about, and he shakes his head and says, "I know, but don't bother with that. Trust us when we say we don't take it into account." But we don't feel we can go public with it until Google makes an official statement, like they finally did with meta keywords.
Anyway, I know you have lots of great things to contribute and really what I'm looking for is a prioritized list, where we can pick off the things that give the biggest return for our engineering effort. So I asked our SEO consultant to jump into the discussion and I'll be following it closely.
Thanks,
Baldy
I agree that Smugmug SEO has been awful in the past but they've come a long way.
You CAN write unique meta-descriptions for most pages. What you cannot do is leave it empty otherwise SM takes over automatically. Meta-description does not improve ranking but does give info to Search Engines (SE) and can improve clickthrough because it's used on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and user are more likely to click if they read something relevent to their search. I build my site so there's no need for additionnal text on the page for a cleaner look and less useless blah blah. But here at SM, if you don't put text in the description, SM takes over and it shows on the SERP.
You could say it's more about design and branding (sort-of) than SEO. It's actually quite minor but I don't understand why Smugmug made all those changes and left that out.
There's a lot of SEO stuff that isn't that important, like multiple URL for one image. Google is smart enough weed out the excess. There's room for improvment, like a site map.
Is that true? I would welcome that.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Just read the official guidelines from Google. Smugmug is not following about 70% of the "SEO starter guide for webmasters". I find it a bit odd that you mention meta keywords. If they are not any good for anything - then why keep adding them and anoying so many Smugmug users with these spam keyword of yours?
Same thing with the Smugmug spam meta description. I'm looking forward very much to this one. Without any hope though - You have to be much, much better than you are today.
Lots of peopple have begged for better SEO, Some have kindly suggested or recommended SEO improvements. Some have yelled and some have left Smugmug.
As I have said before, I'll be glad to help and so would lots of other Smugmug users - if you would taKe this serious.
If you are really interested in these SEO matters, I'll start by suggesting you to look at a huge Smugmug SEO problem - duplicate pages.
I have about 500 photos - Google have indexed more than 7000 pages and they are all more or less invisible in organic searches.
Google have recently intensified their effort to minimize this problem, published: Duplicate content and added Parameter Handling tool to their webmaster tools.
Are you at Smugmug going to anything about this?
Are you going to suggest which parameters we should add?
Or - as usual - keep silent or deny the existance of the problem?
As I said before: I give up - at least until you take SEO serious.
Panoramio: Spectacular photos on Google Earth
Google: Allan Hansen - fotograf og IT-nørd
Blogs: Photo and SEO news by LichtenHansen, Allan Hansen foto nyheder, Antarctica Travel
Homepage: Fotograf Allan Hansen, Unusual wildlife photos
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
This is just crazy. We're not silent about SEO at all, we've been shouting about it
We're going to properly improve our meta description for date, popular and keyword pages, too. That's in testing right now.
We take all this input -very- seriously - including yours.
Thanks.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Yes. It should go out with our next release, it's in testing now.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
You are welcome. Thanks for the quick response.
We are both crazy. We have also cried for unique page titles for years before you reacted.
Thanks a lot for your positive attitude.
What is really impotant here is that the canonical URL's will get the right meta description.
In my opinion the most important pages are: homepage, category, subcategory, gallery and single image pages.
I hope you will provide us with a tool that will give us possibility to acomplish this goal.
Again, thanks for listnening.
Panoramio: Spectacular photos on Google Earth
Google: Allan Hansen - fotograf og IT-nørd
Blogs: Photo and SEO news by LichtenHansen, Allan Hansen foto nyheder, Antarctica Travel
Homepage: Fotograf Allan Hansen, Unusual wildlife photos
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler - 3:50pm
var ssConfig = { AlbumID: '3505170', AlbumKey: 'f3ta9', newWindow: 'false', transparent: 'true', ...
I would like it to say
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Can someone please tell me how to do this? I think it has something to do with my bio page but I'm not sure what to do. Thanks
www.pictureyourworld.net
http://pictureyourworldphotography.blogspot.com/
http://www.onedayonepicture.com
Picture Your World Photography -- Sheba R. Wheeler
Denver-based studio specializing in candid portraiture and photojournalistic event coverage.
Then, give Google some time to re-index your meta info.
We announced this in release notes: You'll want to subscribe to our Release Notes blog, so that you don't miss a single update from SmugMug
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Thank you Andy. I just recently signed up to get email reminders about release notes.
www.pictureyourworld.net
http://pictureyourworldphotography.blogspot.com/
http://www.onedayonepicture.com
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
The speed at which things get done around here SmugMug should be renamed TotallyAwesomeMug!
Website: www.aaronbrownphotos.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/aaronbrownphotography
Twitter: www.twitter.com/abrownphotos
Have not had a chance to read thru but it was sent to me and I thought I would share...............
SEO FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS MADE EASY .......ofcourse SEO is not actually easy and this maynot even be workable with SM................
Saw some comments about SmugMug and sitemaps. This is something I had mentioned to them as well for adding another level of SEO-friendliness to their websites, but I do want to point out that they are not entirely essential for SmugMug sites at this point. I think the main benefit of site maps are so that Google can find and index all of your site's content quickly and easily, which is already being done for SmugMug sites based on its clean navigation system and keyword tagging (if you are using that feature). Basically the links that SmugMug sites automatically create to its own pages allows Google to find your content without sitemaps. I saw results for this by doing a site: search for a couple fo SmugMug sites in Google and saw a tremendous amount of pages being returned. In my opinion, sitemaps for SmugMug is a nice-to-have for future release but I can be patient.
Rank your blog with Photoblog SEO Zen