Smugmug Images are pixelated in Google Image Search

SFM_MT_2014

Hi Everybody. I recently posted a thread about weather my Smugmug images that I third party hosted into my website would be indexed correctly in google image search. Turns out they were indexed correctly, however I ran into another problem.

When I click on the images (hot linked from Smugmug) in google search they are coming up pixelated. However When I view them once clicking to the website they appear fine.

The pixelated photos in question were HTML coded on my website to be 900W x 600H but google image search are coming up with different dimensions that they all hover around 800W x 600H.

Other photos that I've indexed on my site recently (via other sites and servers) coded and indexed with similar pixel dimensions, but they are appearing more clearer and less pixelated.



Does anybody have any info as to why this is happening just when I use my smugmug photos for hotlinking to my site? Is there a way to change this so the images appear more clearer?



If you do a google image search of my site (site:secretfiremedia.com) and set it to only show the images from the past month, All of the photos that are coming up pixelated are from Smugmug

leftquark

Can you give some examples? As far as I can see, all the images are coming in from HTML built pages from your GoDaddy site builder (for example, the first image: http://www.secretfiremedia.com/saratoga-wedding-photo-sp-bb.html), which then point to photobucket. I wasn't able to find any examples that came from SmugMug.

My guess is that Google is trying to take those 900x600 images and then resize them in the browser to 800x600, which is going to result in some pixelation.

SFM_MT_2014

Sure, if you go under google image search and type in site:secretfiremedia.com/hudson-valley-wedding-photography-ar.html and then look under image search you'll see a wedding in question where I had used smugmug and its having the problem.

SFM_MT_2014

I've used different methods to host my photos over the past month to see if the problem is duplicated. I've used (in addition to Smugmug) Photobucket and GoDaddy Website Builder's Photo app.

Using Photobucket and Godaddy, the images indexed on google were not pixelated. All of them were HTML coded onto my site using similar pixel proportions but only the photos hot linked through Smugmug are coming up pixelated in google image search results

Does anybody have any solutions? Smugmug is my preferred method to use with my website, but I won't be able to use it if my photos are coming up pixelated in google image search result.

leftquark

I'm trying to do a little more investigation on what's going on. It appears that Google is choosing not to actually use our high quality images and is instead trying to render the image themselves, at a much lower resolution (for example, a 300px wide image instead of the 800-900px image). We're looking into why that is.

SFM_MT_2014

Hi Leftquark, thanks for getting back to me. Were you able to fin out any info on the problem?

leftquark

We've been in discussion with Google on this and they're doing some bizarre things which are causing the issue. SEO and how your photos appear in search results is super important to us so we'll want to get this fixed as soon as possible but I don't have an estimate on when we'll get enough info from Google and be able to update things on our end. Hopefully soon though!

SFM_MT_2014

Hi Leftquark, has there been any news?

leftquark

We've been in touch with Google but some of their responses haven't made much sense and we were a little distracted the last week or so with the Flickr announcement. Now that things are calming back down I'll resume the discussion with them.

leftquark

Hi @SFM_MT_2014 , I'm not sure if you're still checking this thread but we haven't forgotten about this! We believe we've figured out what was going on and are preparing to deploy what we hope will fix the issue. We're going to do a little quality assurance right now, then release the fix, and wait to see if Google handles things better. It may take a little time for google to go through and re-index with the fix but our fingers are crossed they'll start displaying the right photos!