Google, smugmug and DNS

OvertheHill

I use a custom hostname with a DNS link to my smugmug website which is fine. However, when I look for my site on Google I get the standard smugmug text on the Google detail "The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print" and I'd actually like it to say something about my website. Not sure if this is possible but I've had loads of help from this forum before so if it is I'm sure someone here can help :wink

Ade Hughes
www.personalpaparazzi.co.uk

Andy

OvertheHill wrote:

I use a custom hostname with a DNS link to my smugmug website which is fine. However, when I look for my site on Google I get the standard smugmug text on the Google detail "The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print" and I'd actually like it to say something about my website. Not sure if this is possible but I've had loads of help from this forum before so if it is I'm sure someone here can help

Ade Hughes
www.personalpaparazzi.co.uk

bump.

OvertheHill

This is what smugmug support recommended, so I'll give it a try

There are a couple of factors at work here.
One is that Google goes for relevancy. Smugmug's high relevancy ranking with Google makes our subscribers pages come up higher in Google ranking. Google assigns Smugmug a description and that is what you are seeing.

If you want to change the title in your browser, then Google would index that and it would show up. To do that, login and go to Control Panel and then Customize. In the section for Page Title, put the description that you would like Google to pick up.

It might take days, or even longer for Google to index that change, but when they do, it should come up the way you want it.

Richard

OvertheHill wrote:

This is what smugmug support recommended, so I'll give it a try

Boy, that sure was easy. Thanks for pointing this out.

Cheers,

NaturalEye

rsinmadrid wrote:

Boy, that sure was easy. Thanks for pointing this out.

Cheers,

This seems to conflict with the advice that I got. The description other than the page title surely comes from the meta tags on the page (description/keyword) and smugmug support tell me that this cannot be changed. This is a shame since anyone actually finding you site via a search engine will see this:

NaturalEye - powered by smugmug
[size=-1]The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store,
organize and print.
naturaleye.smugmug.com/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages[/size]

which doesn't really invite further exploration.

I would love someone to tell me that I am wrong here!

Gary

quagmire321

NaturalEye wrote:

This seems to conflict with the advice that I got. The description other than the page title surely comes from the meta tags on the page (description/keyword) and smugmug support tell me that this cannot be changed. This is a shame since anyone actually finding you site via a search engine will see this:

NaturalEye - powered by smugmug
[size=-1]The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store,
organize and print.
naturaleye.smugmug.com/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages[/size]

which doesn't really invite further exploration.

I would love someone to tell me that I am wrong here!

Gary

I hear you, one of the first things I tried was to change the description for my home page so that the search engines wouldn't display the "The ultimate in...." to something more inviting.

Just to share some experience, I found that you can actually 'overwrite' the Smugmug description metatag by declaring your own description metatag under the "Header" section. The problem with this is this SAME metatag will replace Smugmug's automatically generated ones for ALL pages and ALL galleries.

I decided against doing this as I like Smugmug's default description metatags for my galleries and single photos.

NaturalEye

quagmire321 wrote:

I hear you, one of the first things I tried was to change the description for my home page so that the search engines wouldn't display the "The ultimate in...." to something more inviting.

Just to share some experience, I found that you can actually 'overwrite' the Smugmug description metatag by declaring your own description metatag under the "Header" section. The problem with this is this SAME metatag will replace Smugmug's automatically generated ones for ALL pages and ALL galleries.

I decided against doing this as I like Smugmug's default description metatags for my galleries and single photos.

Thanks for that - I have added the metas and hopefully they will get picked up soon. I have also added a post to the feature request thread in the hope that it can be changed at some point.....

Gary

kvkphoto

OvertheHill wrote:

I use a custom hostname with a DNS link to my smugmug website which is fine. However, when I look for my site on Google I get the standard smugmug text on the Google detail "The ultimate in photo sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print" and I'd actually like it to say something about my website. Not sure if this is possible but I've had loads of help from this forum before so if it is I'm sure someone here can help <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/mwink.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

Ade Hughes
www.personalpaparazzi.co.uk

Ade

You are not alone :-) I sent quite a big e-mail to Smugmug support about three weeks ago with some ideas and suggestions for the Pro users. This includes
1. Page titles to use the following format:
<Image name (if any)>: <Gallery Name>: <Site name> - powered by Smugmug.

At the moment, anyone can look into their browser history to see: there is NO way to navigate thought your web site, Google also shows the same title for your entire web site which cannot attract anyone to go there.

2. There are issues with international characters.
3. I was to add in short image captions along with description to separate the two.
4. Adding customizable gallery keywords.

Unfortunatelly, I haven't heard anything back from Smugmug help desk. I re-asked recently about the issue N 2 and got a response that it will not be high-priority to fix.

Basically, at this very moment having ability to use your own domain name just doesn't work. It doesn't give you any more benefits from just redirecting from you domain to yourname.smugmug.com

Sad, but true.