Search engines

photito

Hi all

I am wondering why my images on Smug mug don't appear on Google image search engine. I have had captions and keywords on every image now for a very long time. When i search for images in Google i find some of my images that have been in my wordpress blog or other images that have been published but not the once on smug mug. Any answers anyone?

mishenka

Do you have right-click "protection" on?

thenickdude

Do you allow web search in your account settings (found from clicking your profile picture at the top right of the screen)? What's your domain name?

photito

Hi there

Yes mishenka i have right-click protection on, why?

yes Lamah i think i do allow web search and if i am not mistaken my domain name is photito.com

mishenka

I believe it was officially indicated that the right-click "protection" prevents search engines from indexing the image. Sorry, I do not remember where that thread is that this issue was discussed

richpepp

yes Lamah i think i do allow web search and if i am not mistaken my domain name is photito.com

Assuming that your site is photito.com then it looks as though you are doing things well - nice keywords and captions. You also appear to have a blog on wordpress which links to your smugmug site - perfect

BUT - you don't have many images in google image search which is a little weird. Especially as you do seem to have a lot of entries in google web search.

There may be a bit of a clue from your blog. If you go to http://photito.wordpress.com/ then the most recent entries from June don't show any images even though if you copy the URL for the images and paste it into a new tab in a browser then you can see the images.

I would guess that having the right click protection is stopping your images showing on your wordpress site and also stopping google image search from getting any more than the thumbnails at the top of galleries or on your keyword pages. Although I believe that Google should still know where your images are if you have right click protection (RCP), and we know that is true as you appear to have many images listed in google web search, it does appear that Google image search prefers larger better quality images than just thumbnails and may not be picking up your images because of that. e.g. a google web search for 'An old stone Watch tower over looking Dingle Bay' has you near the top but you don't appear in image search at all - Google knows you are there but doesn't want to show your images.

The benefits of RCP are clear - they advertise to your viewers that you don't want them using your images without your permission

The downsides of RCP are that it may be blocking your images being found on Google image search in the first place

Given that RCP doesn't actually prevent people taking your images (especially as the largest size you have is X2-Large and there is no watermark) and you aren't selling the images you might want to reconsider whether or not you want to use RCP.

If I were you I would:

1. Do a baseline measurement. Go to images.google.com, type in site:www.phototio.com and press enter. Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on 'Switch to basic version'. At the top of the page you should now see the number of images that google image search (GIS) has for you (is says 120 at the moment). I'm not sure if this number is completely accurate but it does seem to give a good indication if GIS loves you or not.

now you can make changes....

2. Put your site url in your signature on dgrin now. It is an important source of links! e.g. Photito Travel - The world as we saw it (note that you really want descriptive anchor text and URL if you can)
3. Turn off RCP on your site.
4. See if your images are now available on your wordpress blog. Hopefully they are. If they aren't then we need to work out why
5. Check the number of images in GIS using step 1 every week or so. I found on a brand new site that images started appearing quite quickly but it took a month or two to get everything. BUT I was also pushing the site URL on a high traffic forum. If your only links are from your blog then it make take longer

If you want to protect your images then add watermarks as that is the only 'real' way to protect them. However as you aren't selling them and they are beautiful you may not want to. Maybe you just want to add a footer to each page with the same message as in your RCP message to discourage casual copying and link to how to contact you if they want permission to use an image. We've had a few people email us asking for permission to include images in publications even though we don't sell our images.

Try that and if you don't see the number of images starting to go up in a few weeks then it wasn't RCP causing the problem. However you do seem to be doing everything really well so it is a little surprising that you aren't doing better

Good luck

Rich

Hikin' Mike

I must say that my Wordpress site is much, much better as far as image search engines then my SM site.

denisegoldberg

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

I must say that my Wordpress site is much, much better as far as image search engines then my SM site.

I've had the same experience. My blogger site is also much better than my smug site for image search engines.

But - I recently turned right click protection off in smug and I'm now seeing image results from smug as well. It's taking a while to build, but it is better than before I removed right click protection (which doesn't protect anything anyway).

--- Denise

Hikin' Mike

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I've had the same experience. My blogger site is also much better than my smug site for image search engines.

But - I recently turned right click protection off in smug and I'm now seeing image results from smug as well. It's taking a while to build, but it is better than before I removed right click protection (which doesn't protect anything anyway).

--- Denise

I've never set RCP on.

According to my Webmaster Tools I have 608 images submitted and 10 are indexed for my SM site. My Wordpress site it shows 1030 images submitted and 375 indexed.

denisegoldberg

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

I've never set RCP on.

According to my Webmaster Tools I have 608 images submitted and 10 are indexed for my SM site. My Wordpress site it shows 1030 images submitted and 375 indexed.

I just entered site:mike.imagesinthebackcountry.com in a google search, clicked images, scrolled to the bottom and switched to basic version. It shows that you have 167 results.

I wish I had done that on my site before I switched RCP off - but I know the google image search results for site:www.denisegoldberg.com are much better than they were when RCP was on just by looking at the number of non-thumb images shown on the results page. Running site:www.denisegoldberg.com shows that I currently have 399 results. I'm planning to check on a periodic basis to see how fast it improves.

Just to show how much better my blog is, running the same check on my blog shows 1130 results.

--- Denise

byoshi

These threads are always interesting as it seems we never receive a defined answer.

My blogger has about 400 images indexed, while my site only has about 100 or so. Funny thing is all the pics on my blogger are links from my site.

Hikin' Mike

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I just entered site:mike.imagesinthebackcountry.com in a google search, clicked images, scrolled to the bottom and switched to basic version. It shows that you have 167 results.

I wish I had done that on my site before I switched RCP off - but I know the google image search results for site:www.denisegoldberg.com are much better than they were when RCP was on just by looking at the number of non-thumb images shown on the results page. Running site:www.denisegoldberg.com shows that I currently have 399 results. I'm planning to check on a periodic basis to see how fast it improves.

Just to show how much better my blog is, running the same check on my blog shows 1130 results.

--- Denise

I forgot about the "site:" feature. Interesting though. Most of my images from my Wordpress site are coming from my blog entries and NOT my "regular" site.

richpepp

According to my Webmaster Tools I have 608 images submitted and 10 are indexed for my SM site

I would suggest just ignoring the 'indexed' number in google webmaster tools for the images

For us we have
Web submitted:5756
Web indexed:422
Images submitted:5416
Images indexed:85

BUT.. we have way more than 85 images that show up using a 'site:' search in GIS (it says 4650 using the test above but I don't know if that is accurate either) so I have no faith that the 'images indexed' number shows us anything useful.

@ photito - if you do turn off RCP and record the number of images that show up can you report back here? It's always interesting to see what happens in real life tests. I did one for a brand new site here http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=240372 to see how long it took for indexing to start. I haven't posted on that thread for a while but I can say that nearly all of the images on that site now appear in GIS

photito

Hi richpepp

I am afraid that most of what has been said above is alien to me. I will follow the instruction given by yourself as much as possible but as far as keeping a record of the images that show up i am afraid i dont have a clue how to do this. I am not even sure i understand what indexing means. When i enter mike.imagesinthebackcountry.com in google search all i get is his site. How does denisegoldberg get all the info?

Thanks

denisegoldberg

photito wrote: »

I am not even sure i understand what indexing means. When i enter mike.imagesinthebackcountry.com in google search all i get is his site. How does denisegoldberg get all the info?

To see results like those I referenced you must enter site: before your URL.

In google search, enter [URL="http://site:www.photito.com"]site:www.photito.com[/URL]. You will likely be shown the results for your web site. Click images to see the results for your photos.

--- Denise

photito

Hi Denise

I followed your instructions and found loads of my images on google/images. However i followed richpepp instructions and deactivated RCP but when i search google, say for example Murci tribe i still dont get any images even though i have mant Murci tribe images in SM. I do find one Murci tribe image in google/images which has been posted on wordpress. So if there are so many of my images in google when i search for www.photito.com why don't i find any when i search for a specific thing like say, desert, meditation, murci tribe etc.

denisegoldberg

photito wrote: »

...However i followed richpepp instructions and deactivated RCP but when i search google, say for example Murci tribe i still dont get any images even though i have mant Murci tribe images in SM. I do find one Murci tribe image in google/images which has been posted on wordpress. So if there are so many of my images in google when i search for www.photito.com why don't i find any when i search for a specific thing like say, desert, meditation, murci tribe etc.

It takes a long time for the images to be indexed after you deactivate right click protection. Just turning it off doesn't give you immediate indexing.

--- Denise