SEO - No image content

Golfnut

Hello,
I have seen a number of postings about Search Engine Optimization. Most of them are fairly old threads that talk about the impact of moving to the New SmugMug.

I would like to start a discussion about SEO for websites that are created in the New Smugmug. There are a few observations that I have questions about and maybe some of you have answers to them.

1. Right Mouse Copy - I have read that it should be turned off to allow images to be seen and I have heard that it doesn't matter. When using this tool http://www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/seo-analyzer.html it reports that there is no image content. This is the same message if RMC is on or off. I suspect RMC on/off doesn't matter. So the question remains, why doesn't this SEO analyzer see images? Plus, do we know for a fact that Google sees our image content?

Thanks,
Charles Pfeil
www.BestSanDiegoPhotos.com

denisegoldberg

I saw very different results in google image search for my site with right click protect on and off.

Once I turned right click protect off (and waited for indexing, can't remember how long it took before I saw a change in the results) I started seeing better image search results.

Try searching on Google for site:www.yoururl.com to see results for your site.

You might find some of these Google search operators helpful.

--- Denise

Golfnut

Denise,
Thank you for the feedback. I have turned RMC off and I will let you know how the site: search compares. With it on, Google only finds 6 images.

Rather than waiting for Google to index, I should be able to submit it in the webmaster tools and get it done faster, right?
Charles

leftquark

When Right Click Message (RCM) is set to ON, we hide the photo behind spacer.gif. I'm trying to find out if Google is still able to read the image file anyways, and I'll report back to you. Google does read the CSS (for example, to determine if an element is hidden via CSS and thus to not index it) so it's possible that it can see through the RCM. We are reporting the image to google in your Site Map, so they do know the photo exists, I'm just not sure if not seeing it on the gallery page has any impact. I'll report back if I can find more information.

Golfnut

I am not too worried about RCM. I have turned it off for now and once you have found the answer to your question, it would be good to post it.

HOWEVER, I have found something strange that may or may not be related to the RMC switch in the Gallery settings. I used the "site:<name>" method to do a Google search suggested by Denise.

I used it on my 30 photos in the San-Diego gallery. For example:
site:http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/San-Diego/i-bVLjtPT

The strange thing is that Google only finds the images that are ALSO on my home page in a Multiple Photos Content Block. All the other photos in the San-Diego gallery are not found and are given this message:

"Your search - site:http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/San-Diego/i-2rLkcCt - did not match any documents."

So, I think this is important and there is something that is causing my gallery images by their specific address to not be found unless they are in the Multiple Photos Content Block.

Any ideas on what is going on here would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Charles
www.BestSanDiegoPhotos.com

Golfnut

I have decided to put ALL of my photos in the Multiple Photos Content Block on the first page, just to see if all of them will be found by the site: method. It will take a few days for Google to crawl it, but I will post back.
Charles

Golfnut

Update - Still a significant SEO problem
1. I turned off Right Click Message
2. I put all my images (45) in the Multiple Photo Content Block on the home page.

Result:
1. Using the method site:http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/San-Diego/i-fwZ8p4d, Google only finds 9 of the 45 images. Of the ones found, some of them were found on Jan 7, which I assume means that Google crawled my site yesterday.

Questions:
1. Why can't Google find my images?
2. Is there anybody who knows what I should do to get Google to find ALL my images?

The reason why this is important is that all my titles, descriptions & keywords related to the unfound images are not being added to my content and therefore the SEO is poor.

Thanks,
Charles
www.BestSanDiegoPhotos.com

Hikin' Mike

Golfnut wrote: »

1. I turned off Right Click Message
2. I put all my images (45) in the Multiple Photo Content Block on the home page.

Result:
1. Using the method site:http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/San-Diego/i-fwZ8p4d, Google only finds 9 of the 45 images. Of the ones found, some of them were found on Jan 7, which I assume means that Google crawled my site yesterday.

Questions:
1. Why can't Google find my images?
2. Is there anybody who knows what I should do to get Google to find ALL my images?

The reason why this is important is that all my titles, descriptions & keywords related to the unfound images are not being added to my content and therefore the SEO is poor.

Thanks,
Charles
www.BestSanDiegoPhotos.com

If you just did this within a few days ago, you need to wait for a few weeks or later (months).

leftquark

Right Click Protection should have no impact on your photos impact on SEO, nor prevent search engines from indexing your images. We provide a Site Map file to the search engines, telling them what your images are, so they can index them and return them to Image Search, as outlined on Google's doc's here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636.

You can see your SiteMap at http://{nickname.smugmug.com}/sitemap-galleryimages.xml or http://www.{yourcustomdomain}/sitemap-galleryimages.xml. In your case, it's http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/sitemap-galleryimages.xml. I counted all 30 images from the San Diego gallery in there, so it looks like you'll just need to give Google some time to crawl / index / display it in their search results, which can sometimes take 30-60 days

P.S: Often google won't index the pages unless they find both a sitemap AND an external link to the URL, so it'd be good to start building external references like blog posts, social media links, etc to the page.

Golfnut

leftquark,
Thank you for the clarity of your message.

I have tested this sitemap to in my Google Webmaster Tools. This image below shows the result - looks good!

Is there a separate sitemap for the Home page?

Regards,
Charles Pfeil

leftquark

Golfnut wrote: »

Is there a separate sitemap for the Home page?

Yep! It's /sitemap-index.xml, for example: http://www.bestsandiegophotos.com/sitemap-index.xml

Golfnut

Is there a separate site-map for my home page layout of the Multiple Photo Content Block?
I ask this question because the .../sitemap-index.xml just has a couple links, neither one that shows the home page layout and content specifically. Is that because the content is provided by linking to the gallery of images contained in the .../sitemap-galleryimages.xml link?

How can I find all the sitemaps?
Thanks,
Charles

leftquark

Golfnut wrote: »

Is there a separate site-map for my home page layout of the Multiple Photo Content Block?
I ask this question because the .../sitemap-index.xml just has a couple links, neither one that shows the home page layout and content specifically. Is that because the content is provided by linking to the gallery of images contained in the .../sitemap-galleryimages.xml link?

Yep! Google doesn't like repeats and since the photos actually live in a gallery, the Site Maps contain the photos original location. I'm not quite sure what happens with collected photos, though.

Golfnut wrote: »

How can I find all the sitemaps?

The /sitemap-index.xml should list all the sitemap-galleryimages.xml's that exist. 1,000 photos are allowed in each, so we create additional files for each thousand photos you have.

Golfnut

leftquark,
Okay, thanks.
When I submit the /sitemap-index.xml I do get the robots.txt warning message. I know this file is for SmugMug, but the question is, does Google stop when it sees it? It seems like it does because it found the robots.txt, created a warning, and stopped after indexing only 4 images. Don't know if they are related.

Regards,
Charles

leftquark

Most often Google ignores the warnings and reads the entire sitemap. Indexing is a bit of a black science -- our experience shows that while they may read the entire site, they only index certain photos that they deem (for whatever reason) important. Building that list of external links to your site helps increase the importance factor and makes them more likely to actually index your photos.

While I try to be an expert on everything that touches SmugMug, our heroes are much more knowledgable at getting rid of the Robots.txt warnings than I am. If you'd like to shoot them an email, I think they can help with the warnings.