SmugMug, Please Stop the Keyword Mantra

NY2LA

I have been wondering why Google and Bing are not indexing my SmugMug site. I have gone to a lot of trouble to write informative titles and descriptions. Keywords would be redundant, and a relatively weak resource for search engines, in my case. There are links to my SmugMug site in a couple of places on the public web.

Now I know the reason. Someone in your Help department provided the explanation: "You have captions on your photos but you haven't added keywords. Keywords are vital for Google to properly index your photos."

Please redesign SmugMug and/or upgrade your system so that Google can index titles and descriptions, and not require keywords. I am sure keywords are not a Google requirement; it is apparently your requirement. I don't use keywords for search engines at:

YouTube
Flickr
500px
SoundCloud

Google has no problem indexing my titles and descriptions on each of those sites.

I am hoping that you will acknowledge that requiring keywords is a problem on your part, and say that you are going to fix it. Thank you.

Ferguson

I also struggle to get captions and titles and gallery text to index in Smugmug on Google.

As I mentioned to the OP offline, I still wonder if Google's interaction with Smugmug is not flawed in a more basic aspect. I do add keywords religiously. I've also posted photos on other sites only to have them indexed nearly immediately, yet months can go by on Smugmug leaving them un-findable, often even the text in the gallery or caption or the keyword.

I've also shared, several times, how many times google fails to even access my site. Smugmug's repeated response basically comes down to "Google hits our site too hard so we throttle it" and when pressed "we know better than Google what Google needs to index". One help desk person told me just to turn off the warning emails from Google as they were bogus, and ignore the webmaster warnings.

I've personally beat my head against this wall enough times. I try again every year or so (and just did my time this year, so am NOT opening another useless help desk ticket on the subject, don't suggest it).

But yes... I certainly agree... Google/Smugmug is broken in some way, and it really gets old trying to understand it.

PS. Here's my latest error count from Google. It just gets higher and higher since late June.

zubenelgenubi

I have the same problem. A while ago I spent hours and hours and hours adding keywords to my photos, creating titles, etc. I did all the SEO things I could find recommendations for. I also did a bunch of poorly explained but highly recommended this using Google Webmaster Tools to try to bring my site to Google's attention. None of it many any difference whatsoever. I reached the same conclusion as you (that something is fundamentally broken). So I gave up trying and stopped caring.

- Mark

Ferguson wrote: »

I also struggle to get captions and titles and gallery text to index in Smugmug on Google.

As I mentioned to the OP offline, I still wonder if Google's interaction with Smugmug is not flawed in a more basic aspect. I do add keywords religiously. I've also posted photos on other sites only to have them indexed nearly immediately, yet months can go by on Smugmug leaving them un-findable, often even the text in the gallery or caption or the keyword.

I've also shared, several times, how many times google fails to even access my site. Smugmug's repeated response basically comes down to "Google hits our site too hard so we throttle it" and when pressed "we know better than Google what Google needs to index". One help desk person told me just to turn off the warning emails from Google as they were bogus, and ignore the webmaster warnings.

I've personally beat my head against this wall enough times. I try again every year or so (and just did my time this year, so am NOT opening another useless help desk ticket on the subject, don't suggest it).

But yes... I certainly agree... Google/Smugmug is broken in some way, and it really gets old trying to understand it.

PS. Here's my latest error count from Google. It just gets higher and higher since late June.

NY2LA

Last night, I read Photographer Jaden Nyberg's "Optimize your SmugMug Photography Website and Make it SEO Friendly", posted on October 15, 2014. He says:

Google no longer uses meta keywords to index website pages.

I don't know how he knows. But I believe that he is correct, because when I search via Google, the results never seem like they come from keywords.

The post is at: http://www.travelingmoments.com/make-smugmug-website-seo-friendly/.

jadennyberg

Hello,
thanks for linking to my blog post about SEO and SmugMug.
I just want to be clear that what I mean by google no longer using meta keywords to index websites is for the actual <meta keywords=""> tag that goes in your website header.

Images on the other hand seem to get indexed with the use of keywords.
These are added to your image sitemap when you add them to your images via SmugMug.

Cheers,
Jaden

NY2LA wrote: »

Last night, I read Photographer Jaden Nyberg's "Optimize your SmugMug Photography Website and Make it SEO Friendly", posted on October 15, 2014. He says:

Google no longer uses meta keywords to index website pages.

I don't know how he knows. But I believe that he is correct, because when I search via Google, the results never seem like they come from keywords.

The post is at: http://www.travelingmoments.com/make-smugmug-website-seo-friendly/.

NY2LA

Thanks for the clarification, Jaden.

NY2LA

On a different thread, leftquark wrote on Oct-14-2013, 03:59 PM:

I realize that for many of you who use the COLLAGE layouts, . . . There is no-where for the caption to be displayed except in the lightbox.

I can't help shake the feeling this is why Google is still not indexing my images by crawling text in my captions. Could there be any truth to my feeling?

leftquark's comment is at: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1918578#post1918578