Images not showing up on Google

essex1970

Hi everyone,
I was wondering if there has been an issue recently about it or not:

It's been 3 weeks now I added new images on a specific gallery.
Today, when I look after it (i.e: "Escargots Salad - Aka Bistro, Lincoln MA"), you can see the gallery containing the image popping up on the web, but if I check on the "images" tab on google, not only this picture is not there at all, but some others pictures from my website are there, with no connection at all with the keywords above. And it is the same for all the images from the same gallery from my website...?
Is there something wrong going on? or am I the only one to have this issue? And then, what could be the explanation?

Thanks A LOT for any advice and help on this matter.

Best,
Seb.

Teach

Can you please e-mail us at help@smugmug.com with screenshots and links to what you are seeing so we can dig deeper into this issue please?

Ferguson

If you learn anything please report back.

I can find my gallery in the web search fairly easily, but despite 20,000+ images some of which have been up for years, very few ever show up in google search, even with very explicit search criteria (i.e. they are not there, as opposed to too far down in the results).

Google just doesn't pick up many images from Smugmug, is my conclusion have a lot of trying.

If they tell you differently and you find the magic, please share.

denisegoldberg

I'd also be interested in hearing the answer.

I found that the indexing of images on Google improved when I removed right click protect - but I still don't believe that images on smug are considered as highly as they should be from a search index standpoint.

If I search for site: looking at my smug site and another looking at my blog, the results for my blog are much better. There are many more images on my smug site yet the site: results for images shows 573 images. site:, results for images shows 986 entries. That doesn't make any sense - there are many more images in smug than in my blog.

Results for site: is also more than double those for my smug site when looking at the "web" entries.

--- Denise

tomoscott

I'm with Denise. I can make an innocuous comment on a forum on many other sites or post an image, and it's indexed within 2 or 3 days at the most. I thought the problem might be the urls SM attaches to the images, so I created a Favorites folder, web searchable, and put 45 separate pages into that folder with easily searchable names. Now it is 40 days later, and not a single one of those pages has been indexed. I thought the problem might be the sitemap submitted to Google, but SM support responded to my request right away and showed me how to look at that. All the pages are there. The only thing SM support could tell me is that sometimes Google takes a while to index pages.

I've never had this problem with any other site, and my domain name has been around for 10 years. If I do a search on this string -- "tom o scott" tomoscott -- I get 42,000 hits and almost all of them are me. But those pages are nowhere to be found.

I have a standard SM menu, and the Favorites folder is readily accessible. Every single page has the keyword "tomoscott". I am really at a loss, but I do want to get to the bottom of this.

essex1970

following up..
I send a reply to the support team today following an email I received from them.
(scroll down)
Here their email:
"Doc Walker
MAY 26, 2014 | 07:12AM PDT
Hi Sebastien,

Thank you for contacting SmugMug,

It takes time for Google to find photos and index them. Can you send us a link to the gallery on your site? We can check the settings.

Make sure you are using the tips we have here on how to get Google to find your photos as they do help.

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93327-search-engines-and-seo
All the best,

--Doc "

and my answer:

"Hi there,

sorry I've been late to answer.


here's the link to the gallery: http://www.sebastienphotography.com/SebastienPhotography-images/Portfolios/Food-and-Beverages/Aka-Bistro-Lincoln-MA/


When you look on google under "aka bistro" or "aka bistro lincoln", none of them is showing up. and these have been on my website since 4 weeks. Usually, in 5 days, images are on google. What is showing up is older images from other galleries from my website which got nothing to do with the ones I'm looking for under Aka. I know some of them don't have tags or keyword yet. Also, the owner of the restaurant posted pictures on facebook after me, and 2 days later you can find them on google search. Mine? none. nada.

And if you check my post on smugmug support, others started to complain. you got a real issue here.

and it's not free.


Best,


Seb."

denisegoldberg

essex1970 wrote: »

...And if you check my post on smugmug support, others started to complain. you got a real issue here.

I'd love to understand why images on smug are not quickly indexed on Google. I don't believe it is the fact that my image names aren't meaningful since the same images posted on blogger or google+ are indexed (and yes, I know, both of those are part of Google). Still it seems that the indexing of images from our smug galleries is not what it should be.

Is there something that I can and should do as a site owner to improve this (outside of keywords, captions, and inbound links to my site, already doing that)?

Is there something that SmugMug can do to improve indexing of our images?

--- Denise

essex1970

and answer from support...
Hi Sebastien,

Thanks for your reply. It looks like you are writing from an email address that is not linked to your SmugMug address. Please always write us from the email address we have on file for your account so we can find your account, verify you are the owner of the account and help you with your question.

That said, while Google web search indexes most content rather quickly, Google Image search is an entirely different thing. Google seems to be rather picky on what it indexes into image search. It may not be enough to simply keyword and caption the photos on your site. To get up the relevance for your site in search, it's also important to get other relevant sites to link to your content. You can do that with a blog where you feature some of your content, by embedding photos and linking back to them in your gallery. It also helps to get other sites and blogs to feature your content.

Note that we already do all we can with the details you add to your galleries and photos, to provide search engines with as many information as possible. Our system also provides search engines with a sitemap of your site, which even includes a sitemap specifically for photos on your site.

We do not control search engines, how, what or when they index content. That's entirely up to each search engine.

If you have further questions, make sure to email us from the email address on file for your account.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero

Darter02

I actually did a test with a group of my galleries that get very little, if any, traffic. I began this last August when that lengthy RCP, and its effect on image searches thread was making the rounds. Basically, I was curious to see what would make a difference.

The keyword was 63rd PVI, which is included in images from a few different galleries there.

I set one gallery to Smugmug style, turned off RCP, and left the gallery metadata keywords blank. The photo keywords were visible until recently, when I had to use CSS to turn off all keywords due to SM making them appear on all images, whether or not you wanted them to. Only ONE image from that gallery ever appeared in image searches.



When I'd check to see where the "Visit Page" button went, it was my keyword page.


The images that did appear in image searches where all mainly from other galleries. Those galleries where ALL collage landscape, had RCP enable, and hidden keywords.



Here's what they did have that seemed to make the difference. They all have "63rd PVI" in the caption, the title of the gallery, and in the gallery metadata.

What's really crazy is when you hit the "Visit Page" button for any thumb, it never opens the image's lightbox. In the image of those search results above, hitting that button for many of the thumbs opens the same lightbox image of the same photo over and over. Other thumbs open keyword pages other than "63rd" PVI. This makes me think, more than anything, it's all about the caption field, more than the keywords.

I wish I'd done a slightly more elaborate test where I had collage galleries without 63rd PVI in the metadata, or the gallery names as well. Without having done that, I have no solid proof of which is more important, the caption, the metadata, or the gallery title.

tomoscott

The fact that so many of us are experiencing the same thing leads me to believe this is a very serious issue. And the problem isn't just image search. As I mentioned in a previous post, I set up 45 pages, each with its own search-friendly url, over a month ago, and not a single one of them has been indexed.

I may be wrong about this, but my understanding is that when Google crawls your site, they crawl the entire site, unless there's a robots.txt that tells them not to, or something wrong in the sitemap file that tells Google that the site is never updated.

The weird thing is that I have "New Work" gallery that is a smart gallery, populated by the keyword "new work". Images added to this gallery seem to show up in Google right away.

Ferguson

Here's my question: Has anyone had another photo sharing site (similar to Smugmug), or know someone who does, and does Google index that any faster?

I wonder if, just due to the HUGE number of images, Google gives a very low priority to photo sharing sites, period?

tomoscott

Here's what's aggravating: my post from yesterday is already indexed in Google, but the pages I created 40 days ago still have not been crawled.

essex1970

strange....
...that we don't hear back from anyone at smugmug here.

troopers

I can't get google to find any of my galleries.

essex1970

any news here?
huhscratch

why is nobody answering us ?

Ferguson

essex1970 wrote: »

huhscratch

why is nobody answering us ?

To be fair to Smugmug, this is a user to user forum mainly. I don't have the energy to go down that path, but someone with good examples may want to send to the SM Help Desk, and see what they will find.

Note you'll have to go through all the "did you do... yes I did... how about... yes that too... etc." first, so you might review their recommendations first.

But they'll answer you there. Whether they have an answer I doubt, but they will respond there.