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Am I restricting my SEO (Smart Galleries & Collected Photos related)
CWSkopec
Registered Users Posts: 1,325 Major grins
Say I have my photos on SmugMug in unlisted and non-indexed (Hello World & Hello Smuggers options both off) then collect those photos to smart galleries based on their keywords (or manually when I forgot about the rules), will these photos be indexed by Google?
Since the virtual copies retain the settings based on their "home" gallery, I'm guessing that no, they will not be. Correct? Or is it just the gallery itself that isn't index with those options off?
To further support my guess, I did a Google search for "site: photos.chrisskopec.com toroweap" [Edit: if you try to replicate, you need to delete the space between "site:" and "photos." I had to take it out or it triggered a smiley] In the basic web results I get a number of links to (mostly) relevant galleries. However, using that same search term for images results in no results. All images that would have the Toroweap keyword on my site are in a "bulk" gallery according to their size and that gallery has Hello World & Hello Smuggers options off.
Alternately if I search for "site: moonriverphotography.com new york" [Edit: to replicate, remove the space between "site:" and "moonriver"] Andy's site returns about 175 images. So it's not SmugMug. So it has to be that I have those options off in my "bulk" galleries, right? Or am I missing something else?
I ask because I'm considering reorganizing and more fully taking advantage of smart galleries but I want to be able to correct this mistake before making it a whole lot worse.
And for those that are bound to wonder, I keep the original photos in the "bulk" galleries according to their crop ratio to make it easier to manage image pricing across all sizes. For example, if I place an 8x10 image into the "bulk" gallery that has prices set only for 8x10 ratio prints I can then use a rule to collect it to the appropriate public gallery for display. On the other hand, if I uploaded that 8x10 image to it's display gallery, I would be forced to apply the appropriate pricelist to each image manually.
As I redesign my site and rework my gallery architecture, I could make these galleries publicly available but if you look at a current version (here) you'll see I didn't spend much time making sure these galleries looked good for public viewing.
Whew... that was more than I meant to write! Thanks for making it all the way down here and thank in advance for the help! :thumb
Since the virtual copies retain the settings based on their "home" gallery, I'm guessing that no, they will not be. Correct? Or is it just the gallery itself that isn't index with those options off?
To further support my guess, I did a Google search for "site: photos.chrisskopec.com toroweap" [Edit: if you try to replicate, you need to delete the space between "site:" and "photos." I had to take it out or it triggered a smiley] In the basic web results I get a number of links to (mostly) relevant galleries. However, using that same search term for images results in no results. All images that would have the Toroweap keyword on my site are in a "bulk" gallery according to their size and that gallery has Hello World & Hello Smuggers options off.
Alternately if I search for "site: moonriverphotography.com new york" [Edit: to replicate, remove the space between "site:" and "moonriver"] Andy's site returns about 175 images. So it's not SmugMug. So it has to be that I have those options off in my "bulk" galleries, right? Or am I missing something else?
I ask because I'm considering reorganizing and more fully taking advantage of smart galleries but I want to be able to correct this mistake before making it a whole lot worse.
And for those that are bound to wonder, I keep the original photos in the "bulk" galleries according to their crop ratio to make it easier to manage image pricing across all sizes. For example, if I place an 8x10 image into the "bulk" gallery that has prices set only for 8x10 ratio prints I can then use a rule to collect it to the appropriate public gallery for display. On the other hand, if I uploaded that 8x10 image to it's display gallery, I would be forced to apply the appropriate pricelist to each image manually.
As I redesign my site and rework my gallery architecture, I could make these galleries publicly available but if you look at a current version (here) you'll see I didn't spend much time making sure these galleries looked good for public viewing.
Whew... that was more than I meant to write! Thanks for making it all the way down here and thank in advance for the help! :thumb
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Comments
The hello world settings should be gallery specific and in that regard Google did index your smart gallery. Collected and smart gallery photos retain certain security settings (like largest size, protected) and prices.
Note that currently collected and smart gallery photos don't come up in SmugMug search, but that's specific to SmugMug search and doesn't apply to external search engines.
Google web search and Google image search are two entirely different matters. Google web search pretty much indexes everything it comes across that it's allowed to index, but with Google image search, it takes more to get indexed. Your photos not showing on Google image search is not indication that Google cannot index your content - you can see that they can by your content coming up in Google web search.
As a general suggestion to improve your search engine ranking, check out and follow the suggestions on our SEO page:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84519-maximize-search-engine-findability
It's always helpful to have other sites link to your content. A good way is always to start a blog where you feature your own work. Then maybe you can also get other blogs or sites to link and feature some of your content? Naturally, the higher ranked / more reputable a site, the better.
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I've been reading a lot about general SEO as I work on redesigning my site but it sounds like I'll have to get a little more specific and read into how image rankings work. I suspect things could be vastly improved if I properly captioned and named all of my photos, but wanted to make sure those 2 settings weren't holding me back.
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