SEO and back links

94lincoln

I have a question about smugmug and backlinks for seo. My competitor has a smugmug site also. I have been using SEOMOZ to improve my seo and get general ideas from other photo websites. It appears my competitor is uploading photos to galleries on his site "acmephoto.smugmug.com" and then linking these galleries to his site "acmephoto.com" The result looks like he is getting some pretty heavy seo juice from "acmephoto.smugmug.com. I assume this is because of the powers of smugmug.com.

When I try to edit "mysite.smugmug.com" I just get referred back to "mysite.com" I would love to get some heavy link juice frmom smugmug.com. This is a primary reason I switch to smugmug. My great benefit is that it is a great platform for building a photo website.

Any suggestions on how to harness the power of "mysite.smugmug.com"? :dunno

We all know how competitive the wedding photography business can be.

Hikin' Mike

I know that sub-domains are treated as a totally separate site. Each Smugmug site is actually a sub-domain of Smugmug, so there is no "heavy SEO juice" from Smugmug.com.

The only way that I know to link 'acmephoto.smugmug.com' to 'acmephoto.com' is to have two different websites.

denisegoldberg

94lincoln wrote: »

When I try to edit "mysite.smugmug.com" I just get referred back to "mysite.com" I would love to get some heavy link juice frmom smugmug.com. This is a primary reason I switch to smugmug. My great benefit is that it is a great platform for building a photo website.

Any suggestions on how to harness the power of "mysite.smugmug.com"?

That's because the custom domain and the smug URL are really the same site.

Have you followed the suggestions on this page - http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1229846-how-do-i-make-my-site-seo-friendly-?

Do you have a blog? Does that blog link back to your smug site? Are there links to your site or photos from other sites?

--- Denise

Tom Foster

Just posting here as I'm interested too if there is some other way that I should be uploading or whatever! I don't think there is any way to upload to domain.smugmug.com and link back to domain.com...at least not from what I've found so far?

denisegoldberg

Spectacular Edinburgh wrote: »

Just posting here as I'm interested too if there is some other way that I should be uploading or whatever! I don't think there is any way to upload to domain.smugmug.com and link back to domain.com...at least not from what I've found so far?

There isn't since domains.smugmug.com is not your site.

Links to your site and your photos are important for SEO. Within your site, use of text in the form of titles, captions, and keywords is important. I believe gallery descriptions will feed in as well.

From this page - http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1229846-how-do-i-make-my-site-seo-friendly-?

Your Folder/Page/Gallery titles, gallery descriptions, photo captions, and photo keywords all feed searches, so it's important that you use meaningful, descriptive, and relevant words for these fields.

--- Denise

Tom Foster

Sorry, I shouldn't have said domain.smugmug.com as I think that was likely to confuse. I meant as in SiteNameHere.smugmug.com rather than the domains.smugmug.com that you point your domain name's CNAME to!

As for gallery descriptions, are you sure they are seen by search engines? I know a lot of smugmug sites widgets and so on are javascript and I wasn't convinced that search engines necessarily saw javascript?

Hikin' Mike

Spectacular Edinburgh wrote: »

Sorry, I shouldn't have said domain.smugmug.com as I think that was likely to confuse. I meant as in SiteNameHere.smugmug.com rather than the domains.smugmug.com that you point your domain name's CNAME to!

As for gallery descriptions, are you sure they are seen by search engines? I know a lot of smugmug sites widgets and so on are javascript and I wasn't convinced that search engines necessarily saw javascript?

It's all the same: SiteNameHere.smugmug.com = SiteNameHere.com = www.SiteNameHere.com

Your descriptions are seen in the search engines.

Tom Foster

I know the two addresses are the same in terms of where they take you but are they the same in terms of SEO? I'm never sure how Google works like that.
Say for example, my website was spectacularedinburgh.com but I decided to change to http://www.edinburghphotography.com and also bought up the http://www.tomfosterphotos.co.uk at the same time. I've got 301 redirects redirecting everything to the http://www.edinburghphotography.com link so all my previous links, etc. are redirected to the appropriate place on the new domain.

However, I'm not sure Google uses previous links to the Spectacular Edinburgh domain for ranking of the Tom Foster Photos domain. I may be wrong! By the same logic I would have guessed that the DomainName.smugmug.com SEO would be separate to DomainName.com?