Why does Smugmug not add a title and alt tag to each photo link using the
caption info?
Hi Allen
I'm not sure that your question was answered. As far as I can see SmugMug DOES actually create a title and alt tag for each photo link. However I don't think you see it if you just do 'View Source' and I believe that SmugMug presents the pages slightly differently to the GoogleBot. If you you are signed up for Google webmaster tools you can click on 'Fetch as googlebot' on the left and you can then see what Google sees which seems to include nice title and alt tags for all of the photos.
It does seem to work but is confusing as Google image search seems to work slightly differently
one thing that I don't get is that google is not finding any backlinks and I know there are several places that have my links, but yahoo sees 777 backlinks. What is the deal with that??? and I'm posted in several other free advertisement sites.
Google doesn't seem to fully report backlinks if you just do a search in Google. However you can get a much bigger list if you are signed up for Google webmaster tools. Then on the left under 'Your site on the web' you can click on 'Links to your site' and even download a table of all external links if you like.
I don't know if even that table is complete but it seems to list a lot more stuff that I can find by a standard search
I think I have given up on ever seeing my images on SmugMug show up in a Google search.
Hi again Jean
I noticed something recently with Google image search that it only seemed to pick up images from our galleries that had a pagerank of more than 0. This may be why we only ever see images that have appeared on your home page rather than deeper on your site . Fortunately this doesn't appear to apply to standard search. This may also be why Erik has so many more images indexed as his PR is 4 which may have fed down to his sub galleries.
The solution may be to make sure that you don't always just link to your home page but also sometimes link to specific galleries instead. That should increase the PR of the sub galleries (eventually...) which may make them appear in image search as well as other searches. As always with links try to include descriptive text in the whole link rather than adding 'here', or 'see more' with the link at the end of a sentence (as I tended to do in the past).
This is the usual YMMV stuff. I just noted that I don't have any images appearing from galleries with a PR of 0. The images that show up usually came from galleries with a slightly higher PR.
I'm not sure that your question was answered. As far as I can see SmugMug DOES actually create a title and alt tag for each photo link. However I don't think you see it if you just do 'View Source' and I believe that SmugMug presents the pages slightly differently to the GoogleBot. If you you are signed up for Google webmaster tools you can click on 'Fetch as googlebot' on the left and you can then see what Google sees which seems to include nice title and alt tags for all of the photos.
You can also get the UserAgent switcher addon for FF.
(for instand hudsonphotos.com, they are one of the big wedding photographers in the area)
ok, last post of the day. It's always interesting to look at how your competitors are getting found and hudsonphotos are possibly a good example for you. Their home page not only says wedding photographers (for example) but the phrase wedding photography then links straight to a gallery that also says weddings and links to pictures of weddings and pricing. Google doesn't have to do too much work to see that this site covers wedding photography.
On your site you could do something similar by taking your bottom line 'Snaps by Poteat Photography 479-310-0667 Bentonville Arkansas Wedding, Newborn & Child Photographer' and adding some links. For example your address could then link to a Google map showing where you are based - this will help Google locate you as it likes to return local results if possible. You could change 'wedding' to 'wedding photography' and link to a gallery with some specific examples of your wedding photography and package deals for wedding photography rather than the more general page covering pricing for different products and which isn't wedding specific. Similar for Newborn and Child photography.
Then, if you are listing yourself in a wedding directory you can link straight to your wedding page rather than your home page and having to hunt around to find the wedding specific bit. Google claims to like to return results where people immediately see what they searched for rather than having to click through. If your wedding info. could appear on a webpage with a URL like www.snapsbypoteat.com/weddings then you get a few extra points and it's easy to remember.
Your blog (which you are reworking anyway) has links to photos that are in the blog itself rather than on the smugmug site so you don't gain so much from it. If possible host the photos on smugmug and link to them (as you did on your earlier posts). Remember to use the 'www.snapsbypoteat.com' address rather than 'snapsbypoteat.smugmug.com'
Thanks Andy. I'm going to post my problem on their forum. Hopefully we'll find out what's going on.
BTW, I added description information to all of my galleries a few days ago and today I went from #9 to #14 in Google results for Rochester NY Wedding Photographers. It seems to have hurt my ranking. It was the only thing I changed.
Thanks Andy. I'm going to post my problem on their forum. Hopefully we'll find out what's going on.
BTW, I added description information to all of my galleries a few days ago and today I went from #9 to #14 in Google results for Rochester NY Wedding Photographers. It seems to have hurt my ranking. It was the only thing I changed.
Ya know, I totally want to agree with you... really. But I've been at #9 for ages and all of a sudden I'm gone off the 1st page. All I can say is it must be a really BIG coincidence then.
I'm going to remove them (and make them blank as they originally were). And let's see what happens. It can't hurt. Or at least it shouldn't.
Hey Andy, I'm curious about something, although I'm not sure you have the information, or may not be at liberty to disclose it. How often does the Google indexer sweep through Smugmug? Although I supposed it may be at irregular intervals, perhaps even on an account by account basis? But for the sake of example, just a "regular guy" Smugmug site that only updates every couple weeks or so, does no advertising and has only a few inbound links. If I was to make a change to my site, how long before Google would even notice?
Sometimes I think people make changes to their site and expect results too soon. For example, the previous gentleman noticing his site dropping from #9 to #14 after making some small changes. Perhaps it's not that his site dropped, but that others went up? Google may not have even noticed his changes yet and when they do, it may cause his site to jump back up?
I dunno, all this Google site indexing stuff seems like a mysterious, semi-random, constantly-changing, algorithm.
I do have a site description and every other pages have the proper description. The problem is only for the homepage. I also get a bunch of Smugmug images like the SM staff or print exemples in the image search for my site. They are buried at the bottom but I'm affraid these images could go up in rank.
Lou and Dave,
Our Chief Geek suggests you contact Google about this.
"The Sitemaps site says it needs to be less than 10MB but can be compressed (theirs is ~650KB compressed) and less then 50,000 URLs (theirs is ~33,000), so it should be fine."
That's for your file, Lou.
I contacted Google about this and here is there response:
"Hi Lou, The Chief Geek is almost right. What he forgot is that, even if you compress a sitemap, that shouldn't be more than 10MB when decompressed. The image sitemap at http://photos.lifesharephoto.com/sitemap-images.xml.gz is ~650KB, yes. But when I decompress it, it's more than 25MB, which is 2.5 times more than the allowed file size limit set in the sitemaps protocol."
I do have a site description and every other pages have the proper description. The problem is only for the homepage. I also get a bunch of Smugmug images like the SM staff or print exemples in the image search for my site. They are buried at the bottom but I'm affraid these images could go up in rank.
What search resulted in that? Please let me replicate?
I see the correct META when I view source on your homepage, Erick.
It was correct before, hence my concern. Could it have something to do with the sitemaps? Judging from the posts in this thread, my site seems to be crawled/indexed more quickly. Perhaps the problem is coming to your neiborhood. Lock the doors!
I've also lost 300-400 indexed images since sitemaps were introduced. It seems most are thumbnails so it's too bad but images from smugmug.com are making in my site search. I'm not panicking yet but a little concerned.
I contacted Google about this and here is there response:
"Hi Lou, The Chief Geek is almost right. What he forgot is that, even if you compress a sitemap, that shouldn't be more than 10MB when decompressed. The image sitemap at http://photos.lifesharephoto.com/sitemap-images.xml.gz is ~650KB, yes. But when I decompress it, it's more than 25MB, which is 2.5 times more than the allowed file size limit set in the sitemaps protocol."
google image search
I was wondering if someone could explain this to me please.
For the last week I have been working on the SEO settings of my website and while I know it takes time to advance ahead, I do make random searches on google to see how successful would my customers be finding my site with different search words. Today I tried google's image search. When my photos showed up I clicked on one and expected to be taken to my website to the gallery that this particular photo was stored in. While it did take me to the website, instead of showing my gallery with similar photos, it had a mix of photos pulled from many different galleries based on date. It also allowed me to choose to see photos from previous months or all the photos but all based on date. I was wondering if this function can be turned off somehow and force the browser to show the galleries as they were set up by me.
I don't know if I need to give search details or other information but I am sure it can be duplicated with any smugmug customers.
Hm, I have no results like that, plugin site: moonriverphotography.com (no space)
I expect those will fall off of Google's index, Erick - since you do have homepage meta inputted in your CP.
The cache for borealphoto.com is showing smumug.com, as well as searching for info:borealphoto.com. After some research, it could have something to do with shared IP. I even have SM's pagerank of 7 but keep losing pages and images in the SERP. This is no fun at all.
Did you read my post? My page DOES NOT have a PR7, Smugmug does and Google is confusing my site with Smugmug. I get Smugmug's title, Smugmug's description, the cache for my site is Smugmug's homepage and when I do info:borealphoto.com, it shows smugmug.com. I've lost half of my indexed pages and a quarter of images in three weeks.
Did you read my post? My page DOES NOT have a PR7, Smugmug does and Google is confusing my site with Smugmug. I get Smugmug's title, Smugmug's description, the cache for my site is Smugmug's homepage and when I do info:borealphoto.com, it shows smugmug.com. I've lost half of my indexed pages and a quarter of images in three weeks.
I sure did read your post. I see this, Erick, your title, your stuff in page source:
as far as this:
I get this on mine:
and here's another SmugMug Pro site:
here's a bilingual site SmugMug Pro:
Can't say why yours is showing up this way when you use info:sitename.com in google. But who searches that way? When I google for borealphoto your site comes up on page1. I did notice that there are plenty of other similar photography sites with a similar name, that's a bummer.
Comments
Hi Allen
I'm not sure that your question was answered. As far as I can see SmugMug DOES actually create a title and alt tag for each photo link. However I don't think you see it if you just do 'View Source' and I believe that SmugMug presents the pages slightly differently to the GoogleBot. If you you are signed up for Google webmaster tools you can click on 'Fetch as googlebot' on the left and you can then see what Google sees which seems to include nice title and alt tags for all of the photos.
It does seem to work but is confusing as Google image search seems to work slightly differently
Rich
Google doesn't seem to fully report backlinks if you just do a search in Google. However you can get a much bigger list if you are signed up for Google webmaster tools. Then on the left under 'Your site on the web' you can click on 'Links to your site' and even download a table of all external links if you like.
I don't know if even that table is complete but it seems to list a lot more stuff that I can find by a standard search
Good luck
Rich
Hi again Jean
I noticed something recently with Google image search that it only seemed to pick up images from our galleries that had a pagerank of more than 0. This may be why we only ever see images that have appeared on your home page rather than deeper on your site
The solution may be to make sure that you don't always just link to your home page but also sometimes link to specific galleries instead. That should increase the PR of the sub galleries (eventually...) which may make them appear in image search as well as other searches. As always with links try to include descriptive text in the whole link rather than adding 'here', or 'see more' with the link at the end of a sentence (as I tended to do in the past).
This is the usual YMMV stuff. I just noted that I don't have any images appearing from galleries with a PR of 0. The images that show up usually came from galleries with a slightly higher PR.
Good luck
Rich
ps. great to see you blogging again
You can also get the UserAgent switcher addon for FF.
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ok, last post of the day. It's always interesting to look at how your competitors are getting found and hudsonphotos are possibly a good example for you. Their home page not only says wedding photographers (for example) but the phrase wedding photography then links straight to a gallery that also says weddings and links to pictures of weddings and pricing. Google doesn't have to do too much work to see that this site covers wedding photography.
On your site you could do something similar by taking your bottom line 'Snaps by Poteat Photography 479-310-0667 Bentonville Arkansas Wedding, Newborn & Child Photographer' and adding some links. For example your address could then link to a Google map showing where you are based - this will help Google locate you as it likes to return local results if possible. You could change 'wedding' to 'wedding photography' and link to a gallery with some specific examples of your wedding photography and package deals for wedding photography rather than the more general page covering pricing for different products and which isn't wedding specific. Similar for Newborn and Child photography.
Then, if you are listing yourself in a wedding directory you can link straight to your wedding page rather than your home page and having to hunt around to find the wedding specific bit. Google claims to like to return results where people immediately see what they searched for rather than having to click through. If your wedding info. could appear on a webpage with a URL like www.snapsbypoteat.com/weddings then you get a few extra points and it's easy to remember.
Your blog (which you are reworking anyway) has links to photos that are in the blog itself rather than on the smugmug site so you don't gain so much from it. If possible host the photos on smugmug and link to them (as you did on your earlier posts). Remember to use the 'www.snapsbypoteat.com' address rather than 'snapsbypoteat.smugmug.com'
It all helps.... and seems to take forever :cry
Good luck
Rich
*Bump*
Who should I contact? Seriously I have no clue. Google doesn't appear to have an email address or phone number for this kind of thing.
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
Try here for starters: http://twitter.com/GoogleWebmaster
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Thanks Andy. I'm going to post my problem on their forum. Hopefully we'll find out what's going on.
BTW, I added description information to all of my galleries a few days ago and today I went from #9 to #14 in Google results for Rochester NY Wedding Photographers. It seems to have hurt my ranking. It was the only thing I changed.
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
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I'm going to remove them (and make them blank as they originally were). And let's see what happens. It can't hurt. Or at least it shouldn't.
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
Hey Andy, I'm curious about something, although I'm not sure you have the information, or may not be at liberty to disclose it. How often does the Google indexer sweep through Smugmug? Although I supposed it may be at irregular intervals, perhaps even on an account by account basis? But for the sake of example, just a "regular guy" Smugmug site that only updates every couple weeks or so, does no advertising and has only a few inbound links. If I was to make a change to my site, how long before Google would even notice?
Sometimes I think people make changes to their site and expect results too soon. For example, the previous gentleman noticing his site dropping from #9 to #14 after making some small changes. Perhaps it's not that his site dropped, but that others went up? Google may not have even noticed his changes yet and when they do, it may cause his site to jump back up?
I dunno, all this Google site indexing stuff seems like a mysterious, semi-random, constantly-changing, algorithm.
http://www.borealphoto.com/photos/1000532182_yeVCQ-S.jpg
I do have a site description and every other pages have the proper description. The problem is only for the homepage. I also get a bunch of Smugmug images like the SM staff or print exemples in the image search for my site. They are buried at the bottom but I'm affraid these images could go up in rank.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Sebastian,Andy,
I contacted Google about this and here is there response:
"Hi Lou,
The Chief Geek is almost right. What he forgot is that, even if you compress a sitemap, that shouldn't be more than 10MB when decompressed. The image sitemap at http://photos.lifesharephoto.com/sitemap-images.xml.gz is ~650KB, yes. But when I decompress it, it's more than 25MB, which is 2.5 times more than the allowed file size limit set in the sitemaps protocol."
So now what?
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
What search resulted in that? Please let me replicate?
I see the correct META when I view source on your homepage, Erick.
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And if I do the same in the image search, there are images from Smugmug at the bottom, like this one and this one.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Hm, I have no results like that, plugin site: moonriverphotography.com (no space)
I expect those will fall off of Google's index, Erick - since you do have homepage meta inputted in your CP.
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borealphoto.smugmug.com
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Any word on this Andy? Sebastian?
http://www.fernandogonzalez.net
Working on it. Stay tuned, Lou.
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I was wondering if someone could explain this to me please.
For the last week I have been working on the SEO settings of my website and while I know it takes time to advance ahead, I do make random searches on google to see how successful would my customers be finding my site with different search words. Today I tried google's image search. When my photos showed up I clicked on one and expected to be taken to my website to the gallery that this particular photo was stored in. While it did take me to the website, instead of showing my gallery with similar photos, it had a mix of photos pulled from many different galleries based on date. It also allowed me to choose to see photos from previous months or all the photos but all based on date. I was wondering if this function can be turned off somehow and force the browser to show the galleries as they were set up by me.
I don't know if I need to give search details or other information but I am sure it can be duplicated with any smugmug customers.
website is liasphoto.ca
The cache for borealphoto.com is showing smumug.com, as well as searching for info:borealphoto.com. After some research, it could have something to do with shared IP. I even have SM's pagerank of 7 but keep losing pages and images in the SERP. This is no fun at all.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
:yikes Congrats! Wow that's awesome.
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borealphoto.smugmug.com
It's not funny - it's rather something to be proud of!
Your homepage has a PR of 7. That's pretty amazing, Erick. You have the same PR as a site like http://mashable.com/
Mine's a 4 and I was generally pretty happy till you showed your 7
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borealphoto.smugmug.com
I sure did read your post. I see this, Erick, your title, your stuff in page source:
as far as this:
I get this on mine:
and here's another SmugMug Pro site:
here's a bilingual site SmugMug Pro:
Can't say why yours is showing up this way when you use info:sitename.com in google. But who searches that way? When I google for borealphoto your site comes up on page1. I did notice that there are plenty of other similar photography sites with a similar name, that's a bummer.
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BTW, if I search for borealphoto.com, smugmug.com comes first.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
What sort of problem?
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