Request to improve google results

rainforest1155

Hi,

I've been captioning my pictures for some time now, but realized that google doesn't care for it. For every galery it's browsing, it just looks at the meta-data from the source code, which is the same for every smugmug page:

<meta name="description" content="Photo sharing done right.  Easily create online photo albums.  Share, store, organize and print." />
<meta name="keywords" content="nigritude ultramarine, nigritude, ultramarine, online photo albums, albums, photo albums, photo, sharing, picture sharing, photo sharing, share photos, photo galleries, photo gallery, photos, photographs, online gallery, picture gallery, picture galleries, online galleries, smumug gallery, smugmug, smugmug photos, images, image galleries, image gallery, photo hosting, gallery hosting, galleries hosting, hosting, photo storage" />

And the results in google look like that:
http://www.google.de/search?q=site:rainforest1155.smugmug.com&hl=de&lr=&filter=0

Except for the gallery title it says nothing useful about the galery or the picture. I guess we can agree on this?!

So why smugmug doesn't put the gallery-/picture-caption into the description meta-field? That would render the google snippet much more useful! :thumb
A step further would be to take the gallery-keywords and put them into the meta-keyword-tag.

Please tell me what do you think about this.
Bye,
Sebastian

Nikolai

This is a tremendously great idea!
I was always wondering why google can't find anything on smugmug - and was always to lazy to look at the html source of the gallery..
You're suggestion seems so easy to implement, and it would have such a huge impact
The only corection: captions can be (and quite often are) very long, so we're probably talking about the KEYWORDS.
We already have gallery keyword. Waht we need to have is:

1. image "short caption" - it would not be visible, but it would go to meta data on the page
2. automatically add gallery keywords to all its images' meta data

Don, Baldy, Ben - can we have this for Christmas? Please!!!!!

onethumb

rainforest1155 wrote:

Hi,

I've been captioning my pictures for some time now, but realized that google doesn't care for it. For every galery it's browsing, it just looks at the meta-data from the source code, which is the same for every smugmug page:

<meta name="description" content="Photo sharing done right.  Easily create online photo albums.  Share, store, organize and print." />
<meta name="keywords" content="nigritude ultramarine, nigritude, ultramarine, online photo albums, albums, photo albums, photo, sharing, picture sharing, photo sharing, share photos, photo galleries, photo gallery, photos, photographs, online gallery, picture gallery, picture galleries, online galleries, smumug gallery, smugmug, smugmug photos, images, image galleries, image gallery, photo hosting, gallery hosting, galleries hosting, hosting, photo storage" />

And the results in google look like that:
http://www.google.de/search?q=site:rainforest1155.smugmug.com&hl=de&lr=&filter=0

Except for the gallery title it says nothing useful about the galery or the picture. I guess we can agree on this?!

So why smugmug doesn't put the gallery-/picture-caption into the description meta-field? That would render the google snippet much more useful! <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/thumb.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >
A step further would be to take the gallery-keywords and put them into the meta-keyword-tag.

Please tell me what do you think about this.
Bye,
Sebastian

This is a very good point. We've been very proud of the amount of indexing we've been able to get Google to do on smugmug, but maybe we can do better.

There's an interesting balance her -- smugmug, the corporation, wants to improve their rank on Google and thus generate more sales. But our customers, like yourselves, want to generate more rank, page views, and relevance for your own galleries.

Let me play with it and I'll see if we can strike a better balance.

Don

Nikolai

Sweet!

onethumb wrote:

There's an interesting balance here -- smugmug, the corporation, wants to improve their rank on Google and thus generate more sales. But our customers, like yourselves, want to generate more rank, page views, and relevance for your own galleries.
Don

It's not even a balance - it's a mutual benefit! I don't mind having smugmug-specific keywords along with each my gallery/image. And, I hope, smugmug-the-corporation would not mind to have some of ours along with the (you said - 13?) millions of theirs. Because this would make us "happy campers" - and we'll bring more others...:-)
It would be intersting to know the percentage of new customers brought by the referrals vs "self-made" ones. I can say that I alone brought in more than a dozen since I joined smugmug some time this spring... And I can only imagine how many somebody like Andy (who lured me in:-) brought onboard...
That said, I think making existing customer happier is a very good business decision..:-)

Cheers! Let's drink to this!

rainforest1155

onethumb wrote:

This is a very good point. We've been very proud of the amount of indexing we've been able to get Google to do on smugmug, but maybe we can do better.

Let me play with it and I'll see if we can strike a better balance.

Thanks Don!
That's the way to go, because I don't think many people will pay attention to phrases like this anymore. Everybody has them and they get quite annoying.

So I guess the chance of people clicking and experiencing smugmug on their own will be a lot higher with personalized google snippets.

That'll be good for smugmug and us.

Bye,
Sebastian

flyingpylon

Just a small point here....

Adding appropriate meta-description tags may make search results more descriptive and attractive to people viewing those results on Google.

However, it's been pretty well documented that Google ignores meta tags when building its index. Adding your photo-specific text to the meta-keywords and meta-description tags will provide little if any benefit to your page rankings.

Then again, Google is not the only game in town, and some other search engines may use them. The problem is that meta tags are far too easy to manipulate and abuse, so search engines give them very little importance when determining rankings.

Nikolai

That said..
It would be nice to have at least something to help our smugmug stored images to show up in gooogle images search...

rainforest1155

flyingpylon wrote:

However, it's been pretty well documented that Google ignores meta tags when building its index. Adding your photo-specific text to the meta-keywords and meta-description tags will provide little if any benefit to your page rankings.

Good point, but just click on my google link which searches for all pages indexed from my page. Then look that the description of every hit...it always says the same.
When you now look at the source of any hit, you'll find out that you only at one point find the description "Photo sharing done right." etc. in the source code...

in the meta tags!

So I guessed google uses them if availiable to describe the site.
Did I miss something?

Bye,
Sebastian

flyingpylon

rainforest1155 wrote:

So I guessed google uses them if availiable to describe the site.
Did I miss something?

No, you didn't miss anything. You are correct. I was saying the same thing, but perhaps not as clearly. I was just trying to point out that meta tags won't get your pages listed any higher in the results.

mercphoto

Googling
So what should I be doing now to increase hits on search engines? I think the gallery keywords are smugmug-internal searches only, correct? Is it simply a matter of me captioning every image?

marlinspike

Well, if somebody wanted to, they could Google bomb

Nikolai

I can be wrong

mercphoto wrote:

So what should I be doing now to increase hits on search engines? I think the gallery keywords are smugmug-internal searches only, correct? Is it simply a matter of me captioning every image?

but so far captioning didn't do any good google-wise. You would have to actually name your files to get any hits.
The purpose of this thread is to help us to achieve these goals without having renaming all the files and reuploading them:-)

onethumb

mercphoto wrote:

So what should I be doing now to increase hits on search engines? I think the gallery keywords are smugmug-internal searches only, correct? Is it simply a matter of me captioning every image?

Hits on search engines rarely have anything to do with what you say on the page these days.

The wording on your pages serves only as an index of WHAT is being said on the page. That comes from your page title, gallery title, image captions, etc.

But the really important part is HOW IMPORTANT is what you're saying? Google, and most modern search engines, don't trust you to be a very good judge of what's important. It does you no good to know that you're # 723,896 for the phrase "great photos" or something, because no-one will get to that page on Google.

What really matters here is almost entirely about what sites link to you, how important they are, and how relevant to the subject they are. If, for example, dpreview.com, smugmug.com, photo.net, Adobe's Photoshop page, and National Geographic all link to your smugmug gallery, your HOW IMPORTANT portion shoots through the roof, because all of those sources are important, relevant, and linked to you.

Make sense? Clear as mud?

smugmug is jumping through lots of hoops (I'd say I've spent months of man hours personally work on this very problem) to make sure that Google can get the WHAT portion right. But the HOW IMPORTANT part is left up to you - we can't help you there very much.

Don

onethumb

onethumb wrote:

Hits on search engines rarely have anything to do with what you say on the page these days.

The wording on your pages serves only as an index of WHAT is being said on the page. That comes from your page title, gallery title, image captions, etc.

But the really important part is HOW IMPORTANT is what you're saying? Google, and most modern search engines, don't trust you to be a very good judge of what's important. It does you no good to know that you're # 723,896 for the phrase "great photos" or something, because no-one will get to that page on Google.

What really matters here is almost entirely about what sites link to you, how important they are, and how relevant to the subject they are. If, for example, dpreview.com, smugmug.com, photo.net, Adobe's Photoshop page, and National Geographic all link to your smugmug gallery, your HOW IMPORTANT portion shoots through the roof, because all of those sources are important, relevant, and linked to you.

Make sense? Clear as mud?

smugmug is jumping through lots of hoops (I'd say I've spent months of man hours personally work on this very problem) to make sure that Google can get the WHAT portion right. But the HOW IMPORTANT part is left up to you - we can't help you there very much.

Don

I should mention that in the context of modern search engines, META tags such as Description and Keywords are nearly useless. So while fiddling with it may give you guys warm and fuzzies, the bottom line is that Google probably won't even notice.

They do use 'Desription' for the result description sometimes, which might be nice, but I'll wager that there will be no change in the ranking of any of your pages within the results.

For the curious, they're useless for a good reason: I have complete control over them, and can say whatever I want in them, and people viewing my site have no idea I'm even saying those things. So the words in the META tags don't have any relevance to what's actually being said on the webpage. Since modern search engines want to provide great results, they pretty much have to ignore META tags to prevent people from pretending they're sites which they're not.

Don