Robots.txt/SEO

lauriewinter

Hi everyone,

I am having problems with visibility on Google. I have followed all the Smugmug SEO recommendations but two months later, Google still only finds my page but no other images or information. It's saying that I have submitted 25 pages via sitemap but only 3 have been indexed.

I also have the following warning in Webmaster tools: "Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt."

Can anyone give me any advice? Please go easy on me as I am really not very good at this stuff!

My website is www.lauriewinterphotography.com if that helps.

Thank you
Laurie

leftquark

Hi Laurie,
It sounds like you have everything setup as you should. The hard part about SEO is that Google and the search engines are a black box with very little insight into how they work. We do our best to setup your site for SEO success by submitting all the URL's to them, including titles, tags, keywords, and captions with your photos, going above and beyond to make your site mobile friendly, and much more. Despite all that, Google still makes its own determination if your links are strong enough to be worth indexing. Google would need massively larger data centers if they indexed every site that they found -- instead they make crawl tons of websites but choose not to index them (store them) if they don't believe there's enough "interest" in the page.

You build interest by having links to your site and getting your SEO rank up. A great way is to post on blogs, have people link to your content, embed your photos around the internet, etc. As google finds more two way links to/from your site, it starts to understand that people want to consume your content and the SEO rank goes up and they're more likely to index your photos.

The message about sitemap urls being blocks is OK -- there's some things that Google doesn't need to know about that optimize your page for Google consumption. Nothing to be worried about there.

lauriewinter

Thanks very much Aaron. That is a bit reassuring.

I have a blog and my link on a local tourism site, but I am at a loss of how to increase my profile in that space. Do any users have any tips? Obviously I have seen that you can pay for those services, but I refuse to buy into that sort of behaviour, so would prefer that it be organic!

The other thing I have seen thrown around is H1 and H2 tags etc. Can anyone gently explain that and let me know where I might add that sort of thing on my site?

I really appreciate any advise, I am still learning! My main aim is for my images to be found in image searches so that I can hopefully sell some.

Thanks again
Laurie

Hikin' Mike

@lauriewinter said:
Thanks very much Aaron. That is a bit reassuring.



I have a blog and my link on a local tourism site, but I am at a loss of how to increase my profile in that space. Do any users have any tips? Obviously I have seen that you can pay for those services, but I refuse to buy into that sort of behaviour, so would prefer that it be organic!



The other thing I have seen thrown around is H1 and H2 tags etc. Can anyone gently explain that and let me know where I might add that sort of thing on my site?



I really appreciate any advise, I am still learning! My main aim is for my images to be found in image searches so that I can hopefully sell some.



Thanks again

Laurie

If you're waiting for the "I'll build a website and they'll come", isn't going to happen. It's tough to sell landscape/nature images online and you said you've only recently created your site, so it will take some time (months). Looks like you've done a decent job optimizing your website. Now you need to promote it, be it going to arts and craft shows, galleries etc.

For <h1>, <h2> tags, SmugMug already wraps every Title into a <h1> tag.

I wouldn't trust Google Webmaster Tools to see if your pages/images are indexed. Just type in 'site:www.lauriewinterphotography.com' and you'll be able to see what pages and images are indexed.

lauriewinter

Thanks Mike. Appreciate the comments. I absolutely don't expect to be the next big thing and my photography is just for the odd bit of pocket money rather than a career change. I have very little expectations actually, but being able to be found at least will make me a little bit happier.

New Zealand is a small market and our local tourism sites do regularly look for images to use, so I just would like to build that visibility somewhat.

Thanks again, guess it will just be a waiting game from here. :)

lauriewinter

Interestingly that site:www.... link you suggested shows a number of results.

I notice there are links to individual photos as well as galleries. If, for example, I Google "Tongaporutu Sea Stacks" my result is found, however not in a Google image search.

Is that just a waiting game also, or is there something I need to do to make the image visible as well the page/link?

denisegoldberg

@lauriewinter said:
I have a blog and my link on a local tourism site, but I am at a loss of how to increase my profile in that space. Do any users have any tips? Obviously I have seen that you can pay for those services, but I refuse to buy into that sort of behaviour, so would prefer that it be organic!

I just took a look at your blog. I may be missing them, but I don't see any inbound links to your smugmug site. It appears that you have uploaded your photos to your blog as opposed to linking to them on your smugmug site. You can easily use the share links on your smug site to create (and copy) HTML to display the photos directly from your smugmug site. I use HTML option from SHARE... Photo tab to grab the HTML for my blog. If someone clicks on a photo in my blog it takes them to the photo on my smug site.

For reference, here's a link to the help page on sharing photos - http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93254.

lauriewinter

Hi Denise,

Thank you that is helpful. No you are right, I uploaded directly which in hindsight is not smart.

The contact button on my blog goes to my photo site but I will definitely go back and amend my images and do direct links from now on.

As an aside, does anyone know how I can Pin my photos to Pinterest? I have put the verification code into my settings, but Pinterest always throws up a message saying the site does not allow me to pin.

Thanks,
Laurie

lauriewinter

Denise, if I put links on my blog instead of uploading photos, am I still able to add tags etc? I know my friend has had success with her images being found on her blog (more so than her website) and she uploads and adds the tags manually to the photos. If I just have a link will I lose that ability?

denisegoldberg

@lauriewinter said:
Denise, if I put links on my blog instead of uploading photos, am I still able to add tags etc? I know my friend has had success with her images being found on her blog (more so than her website) and she uploads and adds the tags manually to the photos. If I just have a link will I lose that ability?

I use the alt= field in the HTML to specify alternative text for the photo. If your photo has a title the alt tag will be filled in automatically. If it doesn't have a title the entry will be blank but you can fill in whatever text you'd like.

whitestarfish

Denise, I took your advice about embedding your images into your blog. For some reason, the watermark (a jpeg) on my older images will transfer over to my blog posts. I changed my watermark over to a png file today and it won't transfer over to my blog with the image. I thought it might be a file type issue, so I made another jpeg watermark and that won't transfer over to my blog either. Any ideas?

denisegoldberg

@whitestarfish said:
Denise, I took your advice about embedding your images into your blog. For some reason, the watermark (a jpeg) on my older images will transfer over to my blog posts. I changed my watermark over to a png file today and it won't transfer over to my blog with the image. I thought it might be a file type issue, so I made another jpeg watermark and that won't transfer over to my blog either. Any ideas?

The watermark is on the photos in smug - it doesn't matter what the file type is for the watermark.

You have control over the size of photos in smug that are watermarked. Is the photo you embedded in your blog of a size that is supposed to have a watermark? If you look at my blog you will see that some of the photos are watermarked and some are not. That's because when I defined my watermark I specified that it should only be applied to images that are size Large or bigger. Also note that only the display sizes are watermarked - the original image is never watermarked since that is used for printing.

It would be helpful to see both your blog and the gallery on your site where you are pulling the photo from. Can you post the URLs here?