Only on the legacy site, the new site for every image has blank alt or title tags. Check the page source
of new site in Smugmug style, all images have blank alt or title tags.
I think Denise means if you use the 'embed' code generated on the share button for blogs. That does indeed include the caption in both title and alt tags
On another note I see that moonriverphotography only has 76 images showing up under image search with about half being the thumbnails. I'm certain it was way more than that a couple of years ago and I'm certain that Andy was doing everything that was needed for images to show up in image search.
Only on the legacy site, the new site for every image has blank alt or title tags. Check the page source
of new site in Smugmug style, all images have blank alt or title tags.
Richpepp is right - I was referring to picking up the embed link from the share page.
Your images will be indexed in the web results with RCP enabled, but not in the Google Image Search.
Okay, thanks.
Michael, what about the "External Embedding", how would an "OFF" influence Google web or Google image search?
Two other questions: where can I get a sitemap-galleryimages from and when / how often is the normal sitemap recreated, because mine is ten days old now and still shows those odd "-1" links from switching to the new design?
Okay, thanks.
Michael, what about the "External Embedding", how would an "OFF" influence Google web or Google image search?
Two other questions: where can I get a sitemap-galleryimages from and when / how often is the normal sitemap recreated, because mine is ten days old now and still shows those odd "-1" links from switching to the new design?
I was playing in Webmaster Tool and used this /sitemap-galleryimages.xml.gz and that returned a 1000 images which is about whats in there
Okay, thanks. And where did you get it from? Are you on new design and if so, how have you been able to confirm your site in there?
I was told it's not possible since we can't edit the <head> element of our SM site.
SmugMug's Baldy wrote and answered many questions beginning before the change. Baldy is the SM CEO/Owner. Looks like time for some of you who have much better command of these concepts to write him a letter. There were too any answers referring to getting rid of junk for the robots - in robots.txt or robot.txt. SM was getting swamped (before the New rollout) with robot requests that maybe were looping. At that time, a Hero kinda explained it and to not worry about the blocked robots - sounded fishy to me. However, I am sure there was a lot of truth to it. Instead of fixing the issues, they blocked the robots. This might have been done since they were well under way programming the NEW and were slowing to a crawl Legacy repairs - understood.
But the more I am following these threads, it "appears" that folks are getting historically fewer hits to their websites. But let's face something - SmugMug is designed for photographers. The search engines have methods for dealing with images. "Appears" SmugMug is not allowing us to populate some of the needed fields - claim some of them for their own usage. If SmugMug is no longer to provide top notch SEO and allowing us to custom those SEO's for our own sites, then SM is no longer a top site for photographers.
I am willing to wait awhile and see what comes out of the wash. Already I have seen a few major (to us) items being fixed. The Hero's and developers are obviously doing the best they can with the massive requests coming through the system and consolidating requests together where needed. Important as SEO is for us to be found, I would hope that crucial work will happen here. They are even working on a work-around (on the system side) for the upper/lowercase issue.
In my opinion, most SEO functions were designed for the end user; not to be hi-jacked by the host. Patiently waiting - well, ok, not always so patient!!
Okay, thanks. And where did you get it from? Are you on new design and if so, how have you been able to confirm your site in there?
I was told it's not possible since we can't edit the <head> element of our SM site.
I was using Google to get more info and for the love of money I can't find the site in my history, I'am on the new SM and my webmaster tool info just carried over for the Old SM (Bing, I had to go through godaddy dns cname etc to verify )
At Yahoo (they use Bing) and Google, there is a place to submit/resubmit your site for the robots. Noticed on one of them I had not been looked at in over 1000 days - ugh! (and yes, I have added tons of images during that 1000+ days). Found them easily in another post here (somewhere ) I know there are paid places that will submit your site to TONS of search engines. I never used them due to all the hijacking and empty fields at SM; so wasn't sure it was worth the price. I amy one day bite the bullet and get a real SEO person to give me a precise report on my (or smugmug) site. Then, making that public, maybe we could get a better idea of what SmugMug NEEDS to do for us. You would think with a site/host as SmugMug, they would have a full time person for this for obvious reasons. I am not so mad as I am wanting the best possible SEO.
Okay, thanks. And where did you get it from? Are you on new design and if so, how have you been able to confirm your site in there?
I was told it's not possible since we can't edit the <head> element of our SM site.
At Yahoo (they use Bing) and Google, there is a place to submit/resubmit your site for the robots. Noticed on one of them I had not been looked at in over 1000 days - ugh! (and yes, I have added tons of images during that 1000+ days). Found them easily in another post here (somewhere ) I know there are paid places that will submit your site to TONS of search engines. I never used them due to all the hijacking and empty fields at SM; so wasn't sure it was worth the price. I amy one day bite the bullet and get a real SEO person to give me a precise report on my (or smugmug) site. Then, making that public, maybe we could get a better idea of what SmugMug NEEDS to do for us. You would think with a site/host as SmugMug, they would have a full time person for this for obvious reasons. I am not so mad as I am wanting the best possible SEO.
Okay, thanks. And where did you get it from? Are you on new design and if so, how have you been able to confirm your site in there?
Jörg, I'm not sure you got an answer to that question so let me see if I can help. You can get your sitemap by adding '/sitemap-index.xml' to the end of your url (which I see you have done before). In there you have the URL to the file that contains all of the data which in my case is http://photos.miseast.org/sitemap-base.xml.gz. If you type that into your browser address bar you will be able to download it. The file is compressed but you can unzip it using something like 7-zip and then you will see the links to your photos.
Jörg, I'm not sure you got an answer to that question so let me see if I can help. You can get your sitemap by adding '/sitemap-index.xml' to the end of your url (which I see you have done before). In there you have the URL to the file that contains all of the data which in my case is http://photos.miseast.org/sitemap-base.xml.gz. If you type that into your browser address bar you will be able to download it. The file is compressed but you can unzip it using something like 7-zip and then you will see the links to your photos.
Rich
Thanks Rich, I knew about that so far. But I don't have a sitemap-galleryimages.xml.gz which hold images incl. keywords and I am looking for a way to generate or let generate it. Like Andy's moonriver site has one: http://www.moonriverphotography.com/sitemap-index.xml
Thanks Rich, I knew about that so far. But I don't have a sitemap-galleryimages.xml.gz which hold images incl. keywords and I am looking for a way to generate or let generate it. Like Andy's moonriver site has one: http://www.moonriverphotography.com/sitemap-index.xml
Well that's interesting, I've never seen the 'images' version of that file here before (as least as far as I remember but it all just used to work so I stopped worrying about it). FWIW Andy's site isn't doing nearly as well in google images as I remember either so something must have changed.
Thanks for the info. The file doesn't appear to exisit even if you type the URL in directly. More investigating to be done
Well that's interesting, I've never seen the 'images' version of that file here before (as least as far as I remember but it all just used to work so I stopped worrying about it). FWIW Andy's site isn't doing nearly as well in google images as I remember either so something must have changed.
Thanks for the info. The file doesn't appear to exisit even if you type the URL in directly. More investigating to be done
I know, sitemaps seems to have nothing to do with Google images search. Just extract both file which appear in Andy's sitemap and you will get normal xml-files. Check them out with a text editor.
Almost all SM SEO activities are focused to normal web search. Try a "site:http://www.moonriverphotography.com" in google and you'll see he got 6.230 links which come from both, normal sitemap and images sitemapp.
Jörg, I'm not sure you got an answer to that question so let me see if I can help. You can get your sitemap by adding '/sitemap-index.xml' to the end of your url (which I see you have done before). In there you have the URL to the file that contains all of the data which in my case is http://photos.miseast.org/sitemap-base.xml.gz. If you type that into your browser address bar you will be able to download it. The file is compressed but you can unzip it using something like 7-zip and then you will see the links to your photos.
Rich
I have a stupid question. After I followed these directions I was looking at the indexed links you end up with. A lot of them were links that were not capitalized, like the new site requires, as they were created on the legacy site. Now, that means those will all be 404 errors when my site is crawled, correct? Do I need to submit a new site map?
I'd post a link to the whole capitalization debacle discussion, but I can't find it this AM. The coffee hasn't kicked in yet.
I know, sitemaps seems to have nothing to do with Google images search. Just extract both file which appear in Andy's sitemap and you will get normal xml-files. Check them out with a text editor.
Almost all SM SEO activities are focused to normal web search. Try a "site:http://www.moonriverphotography.com" in google and you'll see he got 6.230 links which come from both, normal sitemap and images sitemapp.
Yep, tried that. Image search has always been a funny thing and having had a look at a few other people's sites I think I do now remember the multiple sitemaps for images. At one point I was convinced it was also slightly related to page rank as I never saw images from sites with page rank of 1 or less but that is no longer true. However this site www.andrewduanyphotography.com still has the images sitemap but shows nothing in google images. Another site I found used to have it back in July but it has now disappeared. Andy's sitemap still uses the old style URLs so it may be that there is a huge backlog of regenerating these to match the new folder structures.
In any case I suspect that you are correct and it has little effect on image search and we'll need to hunt a little deeper to work out what is going on
I have a stupid question. After I followed these directions I was looking at the indexed links you end up with. A lot of them were links that were not capitalized, like the new site requires, as they were created on the legacy site. Now, that means those will all be 404 errors when my site is crawled, correct? Do I need to submit a new site map?
Any with gallery names were capilised which is also ok. As far as I can see you are okay for the moment. In any case the generation of the sitemap is outside of our control and once Google has it it will read it from time to time without having to resubmit.
I have over 32,000 google entries
Jorg, I have 32,700 entries in google using the "site...." search. Andy has 1020. My site does not have the image map either, like you Jorg. So, does mean I am doing ok enough with google? I only have not much over 20,000 images. Now google is looking at my Legacy site. So, when I switch is this going to go way down? Is that what you are talking about?
So J� Does that mean my old site has a better chance (small as it is) of getting indexed than when I go "live" (no chance at all) with the new site? Sounds that way.
Sorry being a bit late, hadn't the time for a longer answer yet. And dgrin / SM is a bit slow tonight.
To be honest, I am not sure what this result (no links yet) will mean for indexing in future. This is because we don't know what Smugmug presents Google for indexing; might be different from what we or other software is able to "see" / crawl.
At least they generate a default sitemap and by this some links should be to see (or left) in Google web sooner or later.
I already mentioned the 6.000+ links which shows up via a "site:" search for Andy's site.
For your site 32.000+ links exists ;-)
Your site got so many links since there is one link generate for every (don't get me wrong) useless or redundant keyword on your keyword page, which are also to find in your sitemap. Like 001, 002, 003 d4453 and so on. Your sitemap starts with:
You should get rid of them, their priority is pretty low anyway ;-) At least this are links pointing to your site; but here we get back to the subject of the relevancy of keywords; the really important keywords might get drowned...
Cool that you used my site as I was going to ask what you saw there!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for the effort!
You're Welcome.
SO, right click protection DOES mean no image indexing? Ummm, my old site has right click protection....confused more!
We have an official statement now: yes, RCP prevents from being indexed (even when using the old design) by Google image search. As I guess not so much because of overlaying spacer.gif, but 'cause images are turned into background images.
The images which are already to find in Google images are IMHO either from external links (Blogs, Dgrin, etc.) or because Google went through some HTML-Pages and followed links in there more or less accidentally.
example: for yours I only found some images for given galleries showing up in Google images (searched with a partly gallery description, like "so_so cemetery" + "smugmug")
In no cases all images of this galleries showed up and those which, are pretty small (100x100px = your gallery previews)
Sitemaps seems to be a good solution, but as said don't expect them to build links to your images in Google image search. To bad that we IMHO can't create and manage/upload sitemaps our self.
Anyway, I am assuming a lot here - a clear and uncontradicted statement (like it was in the past) about the structure and new design (SEO related) from a SM official would be much better.
About Google images search, there is a nice presentation back from 2009, but I believe most of it still is true. Knowing about the new structure at least a bit now, make up your mind if (y)our images soon will be seen in Google images and if this is of importance to you -> http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-to-get-your-images-indexed-by-google-image-search/
For me it is, because I believe people would rather scroll through ten pages of images than ten pages with links. Its more fun and they see a first impression there.
BTW: my sitemap was updated today. Not sure manual by a Hero or a scheduled task ;-)
Thanks for the info, Jörg. Does this mean you have removed RCP? Yes, you have...I just tested a beetle! Nice image!!! Something from SM would be great, but seems they think they will gather more people if they tell them they can protect their sites which we know they can't and by doing so, limits who can find their images. Thanks for all your help. Think I sent another PM to you...it was way to late in the night for me to remember!! Hahahaha!
Sorry being a bit late, hadn't the time for a longer answer yet. And dgrin / SM is a bit slow tonight.
To be honest, I am not sure what this result (no links yet) will mean for indexing in future. This is because we don't know what Smugmug presents Google for indexing; might be different from what we or other software is able to "see" / crawl.
At least they generate a default sitemap and by this some links should be to see (or left) in Google web sooner or later.
I already mentioned the 6.000+ links which shows up via a "site:" search for Andy's site.
For your site 32.000+ links exists ;-)
Your site got so many links since there is one link generate for every (don't get me wrong) useless or redundant keyword on your keyword page, which are also to find in your sitemap. Like 001, 002, 003 d4453 and so on. Your sitemap starts with:
You should get rid of them, their priority is pretty low anyway ;-) At least this are links pointing to your site; but here we get back to the subject of the relevancy of keywords; the really important keywords might get drowned...
You're Welcome.
We have an official statement now: yes, RCP prevents from being indexed (even when using the old design) by Google image search. As I guess not so much because of overlaying spacer.gif, but 'cause images are turned into background images.
The images which are already to find in Google images are IMHO either from external links (Blogs, Dgrin, etc.) or because Google went through some HTML-Pages and followed links in there more or less accidentally.
example: for yours I only found some images for given galleries showing up in Google images (searched with a partly gallery description, like "so_so cemetery" + "smugmug")
In no cases all images of this galleries showed up and those which, are pretty small (100x100px = your gallery previews)
Sitemaps seems to be a good solution, but as said don't expect them to build links to your images in Google image search. To bad that we IMHO can't create and manage/upload sitemaps our self.
Anyway, I am assuming a lot here - a clear and uncontradicted statement (like it was in the past) about the structure and new design (SEO related) from a SM official would be much better.
About Google images search, there is a nice presentation back from 2009, but I believe most of it still is true. Knowing about the new structure at least a bit now, make up your mind if (y)our images soon will be seen in Google images and if this is of importance to you -> http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-to-get-your-images-indexed-by-google-image-search/
For me it is, because I believe people would rather scroll through ten pages of images than ten pages with links. Its more fun and they see a first impression there.
BTW: my sitemap was updated today. Not sure manual by a Hero or a scheduled task ;-)
Sorry being a bit late, hadn't the time for a longer answer yet. And dgrin / SM is a bit slow tonight.
To be honest, I am not sure what this result (no links yet) will mean for indexing in future. This is because we don't know what Smugmug presents Google for indexing; might be different from what we or other software is able to "see" / crawl.
At least they generate a default sitemap and by this some links should be to see (or left) in Google web sooner or later.
I already mentioned the 6.000+ links which shows up via a "site:" search for Andy's site.
For your site 32.000+ links exists ;-)
Your site got so many links since there is one link generate for every (don't get me wrong) useless or redundant keyword on your keyword page, which are also to find in your sitemap. Like 001, 002, 003 d4453 and so on. Your sitemap starts with:
You should get rid of them, their priority is pretty low anyway ;-) At least this are links pointing to your site; but here we get back to the subject of the relevancy of keywords; the really important keywords might get drowned...
You're Welcome.
We have an official statement now: yes, RCP prevents from being indexed (even when using the old design) by Google image search. As I guess not so much because of overlaying spacer.gif, but 'cause images are turned into background images.
The images which are already to find in Google images are IMHO either from external links (Blogs, Dgrin, etc.) or because Google went through some HTML-Pages and followed links in there more or less accidentally.
example: for yours I only found some images for given galleries showing up in Google images (searched with a partly gallery description, like "so_so cemetery" + "smugmug")
In no cases all images of this galleries showed up and those which, are pretty small (100x100px = your gallery previews)
Sitemaps seems to be a good solution, but as said don't expect them to build links to your images in Google image search. To bad that we IMHO can't create and manage/upload sitemaps our self.
Anyway, I am assuming a lot here - a clear and uncontradicted statement (like it was in the past) about the structure and new design (SEO related) from a SM official would be much better.
About Google images search, there is a nice presentation back from 2009, but I believe most of it still is true. Knowing about the new structure at least a bit now, make up your mind if (y)our images soon will be seen in Google images and if this is of importance to you -> http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-to-get-your-images-indexed-by-google-image-search/
For me it is, because I believe people would rather scroll through ten pages of images than ten pages with links. Its more fun and they see a first impression there.
BTW: my sitemap was updated today. Not sure manual by a Hero or a scheduled task ;-)
Thanks for the info, Jörg. Does this mean you have removed RCP? Yes, you have...I just tested a beetle! Nice image!!! Something from SM would be great, but seems they think they will gather more people if they tell them they can protect their sites which we know they can't and by doing so, limits who can find their images. Thanks for all your help. Think I sent another PM to you...it was way to late in the night for me to remember!! Hahahaha!
I already mentioned the 6.000+ links which shows up via a "site:" search for Andy's site.
For your site 32.000+ links exists ;-)
Just to add to the confusion, are you talking about web search or image search here? Those numbers look like regular web search to me but it is the image search that seems to have gone funny in some way. I may be wrong though
Just to add to the confusion, are you talking about web search or image search here? Those numbers look like regular web search to me but it is the image search that seems to have gone funny in some way. I may be wrong though
Always was talking about Google web search when mentioning this numbers. SM so far does nothing for us GIS related.
EDIT: I have to admit the posts are confusing. Its a discussion about web search versus image search. As said in one of my post, I believe all SM SEO hints and tips in the past focused on web search only.
But it seems there are demands for being found via GIS as well by lots of SM customers already. But I might be wrong.
Fair enough. I've only been thinking about image search as web search seems to work well. The SM SEO hints in the past were about image search as well as far as I remember as most people were finding they were appearing in the web search but not in the image search. Certainly when I was looking at this 3 years ago SM presented a really good view to google image search as at the peak I was up to 12,000 images and ranking very highly for some keywords. The view that the spider got had the images with their keywords and text all close by or in tags, pretty much as the document you linked to suggested. Now we still rank well on some keywords but not as many images are appearing as before and many are thumbnails only rather th an full images. I never right click protect either
Fair enough. I've only been thinking about image search as web search seems to work well. The SM SEO hints in the past were about image search as well as far as I remember as most people were finding they were appearing in the web search but not in the image search. Certainly when I was looking at this 3 years ago SM presented a really good view to google image search as at the peak I was up to 12,000 images and ranking very highly for some keywords. Now we still rank well on some keywords but not as many images are appearing as before and many are thumbnails only rather than full images. I never right click protect either
Just a quicky, you'll find this also in my next post to Trouper:
Quote from SM's helpsite - updated July 15, 2013:
Google Image Search: Your images will be found via GIS if you link them with meta info in blogs, forum posts, and other websites. Search for the word firescape in google image search, you'll find an image of mine linked on www.moonriverphotography.com.
How many images you have on your site? 1.000? several thousands? You better start now to link them in order to find them in (say) 6 month in GIS. We might do a review about that in Jan 2014. ;-)
I do all of that stuff and have done so for years as well as tracking how many images are in the google image index. It really seems to have dropped down in the last year and the image sizes as well. Andy's site which was always used as a reference used to have way more images in the index but it now appears to be less than 100 - one of which is the firescape one you mentioned. Many of the images that showed up were not ones that I had explicitly linked to, they just worked for their keywords and captions anyway.
However that may have changed so I may have to up the efforts with linking again
edit: The smugmug advice you quoted actually seems pretty much like the same advice they have always been giving so I'm not sure anything has changed there.
[...]
edit: The smugmug advice you quoted actually seems pretty much like the same advice they have always been giving so I'm not sure anything has changed there.
Jorg, I have 32,700 entries in google using the "site...." search. Andy has 1020.
Sorry! I was referring to Andy's moonriver site. For williams.smugmug.com I only get 2.860 links (why so much more than you?)
But here as there for lots of the links I get "autsch, something went wrong" first, until I get redirected to another page. ;-/ Might be of matter of redirection from one URL to another in combination of having one sitemap for moonriver (only)
My site does not have the image map either, like you Jorg. So, does mean I am doing ok enough with google?
Yes, Google web related.
But as said in the last post, I believe people like to stroll through pages full of images rather than to scroll through pages with links. That's why we love the new designs in here, don't we?
Do you believe some one ever clicked a link to your site on the 15th result page in Google web?
I only have not much over 20,000 images. Now google is looking at my Legacy site. So, when I switch is this going to go way down? Is that what you are talking about?
I really don't know. But I fear so. Others, which have been here for longer and switched already might watch their GA or webmaster tool and should be able to tell better soon.
"I am" not to find in either way. "site:http://joerglingnau.smugmug.com" gives me 1 (one) link, searching for "joerg lingnau smugmug" or "jörg lingnau smugmug" in GIS (google image search) gives not one hit except a screen grab of my old site from 2009, when I first have been here.
This after almost four weeks being back here.
"site:http://joerg-lingnau.artistwebsites.com/" 5.000+ links ;-)
And of course we / I am not talking about images which were linked from blogs or so.
Quote from SM's helpsite - updated July 15, 2013:
Google Image Search: Your images will be found via GIS if you link them with meta info in blogs, forum posts, and other websites. Search for the word firescape in google image search, you'll find an image of mine linked on www.moonriverphotography.com.
Yeah, what a great feature. And for sure some will try to rise their images status in GIS by linking their 5.000 or 20.000+ images manually in blogs, etc. pp.
I feel this "hint" is a little bit to cynical.
But I am not a photographer; I just do snaps now and then.
ps
to answer your later question: yes I removed RCP. RCP makes not much sense, when you realize that it prevents your images from being indexed / found, but not from being downloaded in either way.
Have a look to e.g. Andy's image sitemap. There are (of course) the direct URLs to his images to find, in L, X3 or whatever the max size is Andy applied to a gallery.
Being a "Power" user now (I was what IMHO called a "Pro" before and is called "Portfolio" now) I am forced to use XLarge as the minimum size for my images, since I am not willing to pay more.
But what is that for a strategy? Downloading of images is not to avoid, so those who don't want to pay a certain amount have to accept that their images are to download at a size which as least is good to print cards or 10x15 cm prints = Xlarge
And those who are at Portfolio or Business and which would be able to use a smaller sizes, believe their image are better presented for selling, when showed at least at X3 or as planed at X4, not realizing they open the door widely for abuse.
But it's fine for me - if I catch someone abusing my images, I may make more money than by selling them :hung
Anyway, I am at UTC+1+DST = 11:27 PM.
Time to switch to Heisenberg and Breaking Bad, final season.
Good night.
Comments
I think Denise means if you use the 'embed' code generated on the share button for blogs. That does indeed include the caption in both title and alt tags
On another note I see that moonriverphotography only has 76 images showing up under image search with about half being the thumbnails. I'm certain it was way more than that a couple of years ago and I'm certain that Andy was doing everything that was needed for images to show up in image search.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Michael, what about the "External Embedding", how would an "OFF" influence Google web or Google image search?
Two other questions: where can I get a sitemap-galleryimages from and when / how often is the normal sitemap recreated, because mine is ten days old now and still shows those odd "-1" links from switching to the new design?
<url> <loc>http://joerglingnau.smugmug.com/Animals/Insects/Mantodea-1</loc> <lastmod>2013-08-02T00:25:42-07:00</lastmod> <priority>0.9</priority> </url>EDIT: you might push this to the normal SM Support forum to keep it away from this thread.Spanish Fork, Utah 84660- 360 Virtual Tours - Landscapes
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I was playing in Webmaster Tool and used this /sitemap-galleryimages.xml.gz and that returned a 1000 images which is about whats in there
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I was told it's not possible since we can't edit the <head> element of our SM site.
At SM I only get the base sitemap for your site -> http://www.wildlifearoundus.com/sitemap-index.xml with a couple of links.
But the more I am following these threads, it "appears" that folks are getting historically fewer hits to their websites. But let's face something - SmugMug is designed for photographers. The search engines have methods for dealing with images. "Appears" SmugMug is not allowing us to populate some of the needed fields - claim some of them for their own usage. If SmugMug is no longer to provide top notch SEO and allowing us to custom those SEO's for our own sites, then SM is no longer a top site for photographers.
I am willing to wait awhile and see what comes out of the wash. Already I have seen a few major (to us) items being fixed. The Hero's and developers are obviously doing the best they can with the massive requests coming through the system and consolidating requests together where needed. Important as SEO is for us to be found, I would hope that crucial work will happen here. They are even working on a work-around (on the system side) for the upper/lowercase issue.
In my opinion, most SEO functions were designed for the end user; not to be hi-jacked by the host. Patiently waiting - well, ok, not always so patient!!
I was using Google to get more info and for the love of money I can't find the site in my history, I'am on the new SM and my webmaster tool info just carried over for the Old SM (Bing, I had to go through godaddy dns cname etc to verify )
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Yes - Besides your photos, SEO is very important, alt tags etc, there is a free ebook here http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93327 down the bottom on the page
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Jörg, I'm not sure you got an answer to that question so let me see if I can help. You can get your sitemap by adding '/sitemap-index.xml' to the end of your url (which I see you have done before). In there you have the URL to the file that contains all of the data which in my case is http://photos.miseast.org/sitemap-base.xml.gz. If you type that into your browser address bar you will be able to download it. The file is compressed but you can unzip it using something like 7-zip and then you will see the links to your photos.
Rich
Well that's interesting, I've never seen the 'images' version of that file here before (as least as far as I remember but it all just used to work so I stopped worrying about it). FWIW Andy's site isn't doing nearly as well in google images as I remember either so something must have changed.
Thanks for the info. The file doesn't appear to exisit even if you type the URL in directly. More investigating to be done
Almost all SM SEO activities are focused to normal web search. Try a "site:http://www.moonriverphotography.com" in google and you'll see he got 6.230 links which come from both, normal sitemap and images sitemapp.
I have a stupid question. After I followed these directions I was looking at the indexed links you end up with. A lot of them were links that were not capitalized, like the new site requires, as they were created on the legacy site. Now, that means those will all be 404 errors when my site is crawled, correct? Do I need to submit a new site map?
I'd post a link to the whole capitalization debacle discussion, but I can't find it this AM. The coffee hasn't kicked in yet.
Yep, tried that. Image search has always been a funny thing and having had a look at a few other people's sites I think I do now remember the multiple sitemaps for images. At one point I was convinced it was also slightly related to page rank as I never saw images from sites with page rank of 1 or less but that is no longer true. However this site www.andrewduanyphotography.com still has the images sitemap but shows nothing in google images. Another site I found used to have it back in July but it has now disappeared. Andy's sitemap still uses the old style URLs so it may be that there is a huge backlog of regenerating these to match the new folder structures.
In any case I suspect that you are correct and it has little effect on image search and we'll need to hunt a little deeper to work out what is going on
Your links with lower case all started with 'keyword' which is one of the reserved words for Smugmug so these should be ok e.g. http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/keyword/grin
Any with gallery names were capilised which is also ok. As far as I can see you are okay for the moment. In any case the generation of the sitemap is outside of our control and once Google has it it will read it from time to time without having to resubmit.
But you can see it at the last modified date and all folder names are uppercase.
Jorg, I have 32,700 entries in google using the "site...." search. Andy has 1020. My site does not have the image map either, like you Jorg. So, does mean I am doing ok enough with google? I only have not much over 20,000 images. Now google is looking at my Legacy site. So, when I switch is this going to go way down? Is that what you are talking about?
To be honest, I am not sure what this result (no links yet) will mean for indexing in future. This is because we don't know what Smugmug presents Google for indexing; might be different from what we or other software is able to "see" / crawl.
At least they generate a default sitemap and by this some links should be to see (or left) in Google web sooner or later.
I already mentioned the 6.000+ links which shows up via a "site:" search for Andy's site.
For your site 32.000+ links exists ;-)
Your site got so many links since there is one link generate for every (don't get me wrong) useless or redundant keyword on your keyword page, which are also to find in your sitemap. Like 001, 002, 003 d4453 and so on. Your sitemap starts with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> - <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com/keyword</loc> <priority>0.9</priority> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com/keyword/001</loc> <priority>0.4</priority> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com/keyword/003</loc> <priority>0.4</priority> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com/keyword/004</loc> <priority>0.4</priority> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.southeasternphotography.com/keyword/04</loc> <priority>0.4</priority> </url>You should get rid of them, their priority is pretty low anyway ;-) At least this are links pointing to your site; but here we get back to the subject of the relevancy of keywords; the really important keywords might get drowned...You're Welcome.
We have an official statement now: yes, RCP prevents from being indexed (even when using the old design) by Google image search. As I guess not so much because of overlaying spacer.gif, but 'cause images are turned into background images.
The images which are already to find in Google images are IMHO either from external links (Blogs, Dgrin, etc.) or because Google went through some HTML-Pages and followed links in there more or less accidentally.
example: for yours I only found some images for given galleries showing up in Google images (searched with a partly gallery description, like "so_so cemetery" + "smugmug")
In no cases all images of this galleries showed up and those which, are pretty small (100x100px = your gallery previews)
Sitemaps seems to be a good solution, but as said don't expect them to build links to your images in Google image search. To bad that we IMHO can't create and manage/upload sitemaps our self.
Anyway, I am assuming a lot here - a clear and uncontradicted statement (like it was in the past) about the structure and new design (SEO related) from a SM official would be much better.
About Google images search, there is a nice presentation back from 2009, but I believe most of it still is true. Knowing about the new structure at least a bit now, make up your mind if (y)our images soon will be seen in Google images and if this is of importance to you -> http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-to-get-your-images-indexed-by-google-image-search/
For me it is, because I believe people would rather scroll through ten pages of images than ten pages with links. Its more fun and they see a first impression there.
BTW: my sitemap was updated today. Not sure manual by a Hero or a scheduled task ;-)
thanks for the info
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Dammed if you do and Dammed if you don't
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Just to add to the confusion, are you talking about web search or image search here? Those numbers look like regular web search to me but it is the image search that seems to have gone funny in some way. I may be wrong though
EDIT: I have to admit the posts are confusing. Its a discussion about web search versus image search. As said in one of my post, I believe all SM SEO hints and tips in the past focused on web search only.
But it seems there are demands for being found via GIS as well by lots of SM customers already. But I might be wrong.
Quote from SM's helpsite - updated July 15, 2013: How many images you have on your site? 1.000? several thousands? You better start now to link them in order to find them in (say) 6 month in GIS. We might do a review about that in Jan 2014. ;-)
However that may have changed so I may have to up the efforts with linking again
edit: The smugmug advice you quoted actually seems pretty much like the same advice they have always been giving so I'm not sure anything has changed there.
But here as there for lots of the links I get "autsch, something went wrong" first, until I get redirected to another page. ;-/ Might be of matter of redirection from one URL to another in combination of having one sitemap for moonriver (only) Yes, Google web related.
But as said in the last post, I believe people like to stroll through pages full of images rather than to scroll through pages with links. That's why we love the new designs in here, don't we?
Do you believe some one ever clicked a link to your site on the 15th result page in Google web?
I really don't know. But I fear so. Others, which have been here for longer and switched already might watch their GA or webmaster tool and should be able to tell better soon.
"I am" not to find in either way. "site:http://joerglingnau.smugmug.com" gives me 1 (one) link, searching for "joerg lingnau smugmug" or "jörg lingnau smugmug" in GIS (google image search) gives not one hit except a screen grab of my old site from 2009, when I first have been here.
This after almost four weeks being back here.
"site:http://joerg-lingnau.artistwebsites.com/" 5.000+ links ;-)
And of course we / I am not talking about images which were linked from blogs or so.
Quote from SM's helpsite - updated July 15, 2013: Yeah, what a great feature. And for sure some will try to rise their images status in GIS by linking their 5.000 or 20.000+ images manually in blogs, etc. pp.
I feel this "hint" is a little bit to cynical.
But I am not a photographer; I just do snaps now and then.
ps
to answer your later question: yes I removed RCP. RCP makes not much sense, when you realize that it prevents your images from being indexed / found, but not from being downloaded in either way.
Have a look to e.g. Andy's image sitemap. There are (of course) the direct URLs to his images to find, in L, X3 or whatever the max size is Andy applied to a gallery.
Being a "Power" user now (I was what IMHO called a "Pro" before and is called "Portfolio" now) I am forced to use XLarge as the minimum size for my images, since I am not willing to pay more.
But what is that for a strategy? Downloading of images is not to avoid, so those who don't want to pay a certain amount have to accept that their images are to download at a size which as least is good to print cards or 10x15 cm prints = Xlarge
And those who are at Portfolio or Business and which would be able to use a smaller sizes, believe their image are better presented for selling, when showed at least at X3 or as planed at X4, not realizing they open the door widely for abuse.
But it's fine for me - if I catch someone abusing my images, I may make more money than by selling them :hung
Anyway, I am at UTC+1+DST = 11:27 PM.
Time to switch to Heisenberg and Breaking Bad, final season.
Good night.