Using Picasa is not a "workaround" it's just another vehicle / way to get your name found. I do it purely so that Google Image Search may find my stuff and then visitors may get to my main site from that search.
I'm having trouble understanding this, can you explain please Andy ? Do you mean that you put all your images with Picasa, just some of them, are they all public ? Do yu have a Picasa site/album that you can refer us to?
I'm having trouble understanding this, can you explain please Andy ? Do you mean that you put all your images with Picasa, just some of them, are they all public ? Do yu have a Picasa site/album that you can refer us to?
Sorry if I'm missing something here :-((
Caroline
Caroline, sorry I didn't reply before as I thought you had found the post already.
If you click on page 11 in this thread and look for entry 112, you will find the initial post by Andy regarding Picasa:)
Hi Denise,
This drives me nuts, I agree with you that images only seem to appear if they have been linked to in my blog, otherwise I've never found anything of mine in a google image search. Very disappointing considering the effort I have made in the past to keyword etc etc etc till I'm blue in the face.
Caroline
[quote=denisegoldberg
In my experience, my images pop up on a search on Google images if I have included a link to them in by blog. I don't see images pop up in an image search based on keywords on the photos. That still seems a bit odd to me, but I guess I just don't understand how the "global" image searches work.
I just did a search for you using your full name in quotes, and the first page of results look to be your photos - http://images.google.com/images?ndsp=21&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1T5GGLL_enUS272US272&q=%22caroline+shipsey%22&start=0&sa=N. Of course that's not the search you want to find your images, is it? I'm kind of assuming you're interested in getting hits on Mendip Hills as opposed to your name. To my searching eyes, it still appears that references to photos in blog entries is what helps get them into image search results.
What I mean is that if I don't use Picasa at all and I just use all the other things like keywords, links etc etc, I STILL don't get the images showing up in Google Image search results. Therefore, without Picasa, google doesn't seem to find these images in their search at all.
Exactly. The general consensus from all of us here is that we want to JUST use SmugMug and have Google Image Search find the pictures here.
Andy, you are 100% correct in saying that to maximize our visibility on the web that we should be putting links to our photos in blogs, forums, Picasa, Flickr, etc. However, I wasn't asking how to maximize my findability or other SEO things. My question is a purely technical one: why doesn't Google Image Search crawl SmugMug? Is it because the site uses AJAX for the images, and Google Image Search can't index catalogs as a result? Is there some other technical reason?
I used to have a Flickr account and my images did show up in Google Image Search. I got rid of my Flickr account and moved to SmugMug because SmugMug clearly beats Flickr in terms of features. But it is disappointing that while a free website seems to work just fine in terms of being indexed by Google Image Search, SmugMug does not.
........
I used to have a Flickr account and my images did show up in Google Image Search. I got rid of my Flickr account and moved to SmugMug because SmugMug clearly beats Flickr in terms of features. But it is disappointing that while a free website seems to work just fine in terms of being indexed by Google Image Search, SmugMug does not.
out of mere curiosity do images on Zenfolio show up in google image search ?
Here are my Smugmug, Google Analytics, and Flickr Stats for comparison.
In an effort to illustrate my point about the apparent fact that keywording seems to have had almost NO effect on increasing the findability of my photos on smugmug in Google Images or other search engines, here are some stats that I'd like to share so that we can discuss this in more detail as I think many of us feel that this is an extremely important issue.
Firstly, for those who may not know, there is a large discrepancy between Smugmug stats and Google analytics, and this has been explained to me before that it is due to the fact that google can not count instances of clicks on links to photos which are contained within forums, such as DGRIN. So my Smugmug stats always far outnumber my Google Analytics stats, meaning that there are many other smugmuggers who are visiting my galleries than there are visitors from other sources such as search engines. I think we are all very flattered when we have many visits from fellow Smugmuggers, but for Pro users who would like to get exposure for their photos BEYOND the Smugmug community, this is an issue.
After having read through the post on increasing findability on search engines by keywording, captioning, adding descriptions to galleries, and adding hidden gallery keywords, I spent many an hour diligently entering all this meta-data for my photos and galleries. The only thing I haven't done so far is start a blog.
However, despite all this hard work, the result of it from objective analysis of the stats, is essentially almost ZERO.
Let's look at the stats for my Smugmug over the last 9 days:
In total, there are over 40,000 hits for my photos, which normally, you'd be quite happy with. But let's look at where the traffic is coming from by looking at my Google Analytics for my site:
As you can see from the top line graph, for the month of February this year, I have anywhere between 20 to 70 visitors per day. Let's take a look at the stats for the source of traffic:
Search Engines - 2.74%! From the links to Top Traffic Sources, you can see that most of the traffic is from within Smugmug or Dgrin itself. So from these stats, it does not appear that all the work I did in keywording etc etc made any difference whatsoever to increasing their findability in search engines.
Let's have a look at some more stats in detail:
Here, we can see that even when including the nearly the last 3 weeks of January, there were a total of 4 visits from Google Search. When I look at my source URLs, all 4 of those visits were from Google Keyword search and NOT from Google Image Search. That is, this confirms what I have been saying about my images not being findable in Google Image Search.
Finally, let's compare these stats to my Flickr Pro account stats as of today:
As you can see, Search Engines are responsible for 31% of my traffic, and Google Images and Yahooo Images each responsible for 13% of traffic to my Flickr photos. This is in huge contrast to the 2.74% that I get from my Smugmug pro account despite that fact that my photos in Smugmug are MUCH more detailed in keywords, captions, titles and descriptions than the vast majority of my Flickr photos.
I just wanted to present some statistics so that we can continue this discussion objectively and work out what is going wrong as I simply can not take it as fact that if we do all we were advised to do with respect to increasing findability, that the Search Engines would actually find us.
I'd love to hear thoughts from the Smugmug team as well as other Smugmuggers.
Thanks.
P.S It doesn't appear that this issue affects all Smugmug users, but there certainly seem to be many on this thread who are having very similar experiences to the one that I am having.
Hi Nelson,
Whilst I'm not as au fait with interpreting the Google Analytics reports, in general I see the same pattern for my site. I too worked hard at keywording, captioning etc and am similarly disappointed that it appeared to make no difference. I only have a few links to my site and have struggled to get those but otherwise I believe I have followed the instructions in this thread as best I can.
The idea of having to put some pics on Picasa really tees me off :-((
The idea of having to put some pics on Picasa really tees me off :-((
I did put a few pics on Picasa, and I really don't think it helped at all.
I see the same thing on my site that everyone else is reporting. I guess I really don't understand how the image searching on Google works. Or more specifically, I don't understand why it doesn't pick up keyworded pics from smug. Although it does (sometimes) pick up pics that I have posted in my blog...
Thanks for the feedback Caroline. I'm sure there are others who are experiencing similar problems as well. Yes, I agree with you that putting some pics onto Picasa shouldn't have to be done if our sites are indexed correctly.
I'm not SmugMug support, but here's my guess. I looked at the source code for a picture in one of my galleries to see how it was put together, and as I suspected it was heavy on AJAX code. As a side effect of this, your picture name, caption, keywords etc. are not in the code at all. That info is loaded dynmaically via Javascript. The same goes for the image itself: the file name is not in the source code, the picture too is loaded dynamically.
Since Google Image Search looks for words close to the image file name in the page source code for indexing purposes, it can't find anything on SmugMug sites: the file name itself isn't in the source code, let alone anything nice like captions or keywords!
Contrast this with Flickr: viewing the page source for my one picture I have left, the file name of the image is clearly there, along with alt text for the image, and tags are nearby, just a bit farther down in the source code. If I search Google Images using the alt text of that image, it pops up immediately. If I search Google Images using the tags of that image, it also pops up. That's because Google can actually index those words since they are in the page source.
It would be nice to hear from SmugMug support so they could definitively say, "Yes, this is the problem." It'd be nicer for them to tweak the page source code so that the file name, captions, and keywords are all in the source so it could be indexed, or at least find some other way to make it visible to Google's crawlers. AJAX can be a pain in this way, although I did enjoy reading some of the comments in the source (like "// we do this for FF3, it is lame").
Thanks for your feedback mccoons, Denise, and doctorgonzo.
doctorgonzo, you may be on to something here with respect to the AJAX code. Do you know what element of a website involves the AJAX code? The reason I'm asking is that because some users are experiencing problems whilst others are not, it may be to do with features that the affected users have specifically on their website, such as an opening slideshow or something like that. I have no experience in code so I wouldn't know.
You're right, it would be nice to hear from Smugmug support so that we can have a discussion about it. I think Smugmug needs to acknowledge and accept that this is a problem first. Then we can try to work together to figure it out. They've been unusually quiet since I posted the examples of the Smugmug, Google, and Flickr stats up though.
Hi Nelson,
With ref to your comment that some users are not experiencing problems,
I had been giving this some thought since yesterday and wonder if these people would join this thread and post their urls so the rest of us can get some idea of what we might be doing differently.
The absence of any comment or explanation from Smugmug, other than to keep referring us back to implementing the advice in the thread is not satisfactory.
You are in Australia and I am in the UK so our customers are unlikely to use Smugmug for prints etc, exchange rates, delivery times/charges being the main reasons. It doesn't matter as much to an event or wedding photographer whether a google image search returns a result for their images as it does to people in our situation.
The current economic situation that we in the UK are experiencing means that more than ever I need to make my money work for me. Spending $150 on my site and then to find that my images are not as visible as I need them to be is bad news.
Ok, if I'm doing something wrong then please TELL ME, don't keep on using the stock reply of implementing the advice of this thread etc etc because I honestly believe I have. It can't really be such a mystery can it ??
Caroline
BTW I've always found this is a bad time of day to get Smugmug's attention - they're still asleep :-)
Hi Denise,
Thanks for the link, it makes very interesting reading though not very encouraging :-((
I guess those of us for whom this matters are all fighting a battle that we are unlikely to win.
Yes, I think that's a good idea. If anyone has had GOOD results with their Smugmug images being found on Google and Google Image Search, please let us know. Funnily enough, my page WAS number 1 on Google until recently without me having changed anything, and suddenly it's gone down to page 4 on search, and that is not even my home page, but some sub-gallery.
I also agree that if the system is broken, we should know about it so that at least we can stop wasting time keywording, captioning, and adding descriptions to every photo and gallery. Of course, for some of us and for potential customers, it will definitely influence the decision of whether or not to continue using Smugmug if it really means that your photos are essentially invisible online to everyone but the smugmug community.
Thanks Denise. I have posted in that thread as well to see if we can put everyone's heads together to get to the bottom of this.
Since I actually work for a company who's bread and butter is SEO I thought I would throw my hat into this discussion.
Caveat: I don't know code and I certainly don't know programming. However, I'm almost 2 years in this job and I do feel like I know some of the basics pretty well.
Let's start off with using some free tools out there on the web that help break down the SEO issue further.
The biggest thing that stands out to me is the Page Rank: Smugmug's 7 versus Flicker's 9 (!).
(FYI, I don't know if anyone else has noticed but Google must've recently changed their page ranking algorithm because Smugmug's rank WAS 8 not too long ago and I know all of our websites for our company dropped 1 point as well. Just food for thought).
But for the sake of argument here, let's compare individual photographer's websites to see what kind of grades we get.
Andy has a grade of 90 while Shrekie has a grade of 39. Both of you also have flash elements for your home page and for some reason that is being applied to your meta description. That is wacky. Someone who knows code could explain this further. I don't know if that's "wrong" or "right" but for what it's worth, Flash is not SEO friendly. Having flash elements on your site is ok, which this is the case; but having a site that's purely flash can be detrimental if you don't know what you're doing.
(For anyone that doesn't know, your meta description is the 1-2 sentences of descriptive text that show up on SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages below your link).
Also, for what it's worth, my site only has a grade of 58 and there's a boat load of old tweaks and such from years ago when I had more time to fiddle with my site. Boy do I have some serious work ahead of me.
So here is a quick list of some problems that stand out to me:
1. alt tags are missing from images (this appears to happen with thumbnails that are displayed on the page)
2. the meta keywords on all of our sites default to Smugmug's home page. I believe this was brought up previously but this should be fixed. We all have different sites, purposes, and niche markets and having a standard group of keywords just ain't gonna work.
3. Another thing that bothers me is the file path for individual galleries. Now that could be something that can be overwritten with code somewhere, but I haven't had a whole lot of time to look further into this issue. For example:
is FAR from SEO friendly. It's like that for everyone on Smugmug as far as I can tell.
4. Deprecated and invalid Code
If any of you have Chris Pederick's website tool plugin for firefox, you may have played around with Validating a page's HTML. Smugmug is full of errors across the board. And search engines like Google place a certain value on correct, error-free code.
For example, smugmug's home page has 32 errors and 40 warnings. A lot of this could be fixed easily if someone who knows their code well could go in and clean some things up (I know because a lot of the errors are easy fixes that even I could do with my limited knowledge of HTML).
Andy's home page has 54 errors, 96 warnings. I have 23 errors, 50 warnings. Shrekie has 22 errors, 40 warnings. And these are just home pages, each page you have has to contain valid HTML.
In Closing...
I know I haven't helped a whole lot since I can't actually get in there and make tweaks and changes or offer coding / programming advice like others can but I hope that some of this information may prove useful to some of you out there.
Thanks so much for your brilliant input into this discussion! The information and the links to objective statistics showing the difference in Google Rank between the two sites is really illuminating. I have just had a brief look over it all and will look at it in more detail tonight, but it appears that apart from having a blog, other worthwhile things to do is to submit links to delicious and digg, both of which make more sense than to replicate your images into another photo hosting site such as Picasa.
I just wanted to say a quick BIG THANK YOU and will look into this further tonight.
Still waiting to hear from Smugmug regarding this.
Well, I was seriously thinking about transferring my files from Photoshelter and over to SmugMug for various reasons, but after reading about the problems with SEO, and the apparent lack of understanding on the working photographer's needs and/or feedback from Admin., ..... well, ..... I'm not so sure that a SmugMug site would do the trick.
I do actively market my work and I am doing just fine with that. Plenty of shooting to do which is why I was looking at a site that would be quick and easy to use.
But, ... good SEO is still a must!
Putting images on Picasa so Google can find them at SmugMug?
You're kidding, ............ right?
Did I mis-read something?
Well, I was seriously thinking about transferring my files from Photoshelter and over to SmugMug for various reasons, but after reading about the problems with SEO, and the apparent lack of understanding on the working photographer's needs and/or feedback from Admin., ..... well, ..... I'm not so sure that a SmugMug site would do the trick.
Hi Michael. I too am frustrated with the SEO issues right now but I've also been a pro customer for 4 years now and I did not choose Smugmug lightly.
Granted, 4 years ago I didn't know what SEO was. I was just looking for great features and great support - and I definitely found that here.
I suppose the funniest thing about the reports I put up in my previous post is that a lot of what Smugmug can do is simple. Time-consuming? Sure. But simple (like fixing deprecated code).
Bottom line though, is that when these issues are addressed and fixed Smugmug will at the very least stand stand by side with Flickr when it's all said and done.
Thanks so much for your brilliant input into this discussion! The information and the links to objective statistics showing the difference in Google Rank between the two sites is really illuminating. I have just had a brief look over it all and will look at it in more detail tonight, but it appears that apart from having a blog, other worthwhile things to do is to submit links to delicious and digg, both of which make more sense than to replicate your images into another photo hosting site such as Picasa.
I just wanted to say a quick BIG THANK YOU and will look into this further tonight.
Still waiting to hear from Smugmug regarding this.
Other worthwhile things that you can do while we have SEO issues with Smugmug:
1. Update your website often. If you have 50 shots to add to a gallery, do so slowly. Split it up into 2 or 3 groups of additions so that it looks like you have enough content to update almost every day or even every day.
2. If you have a blog and link back to to your galleries or individual pictures on smugmug, your ANCHOR TEXT is extremely important. Anchor text is tellling search engines that you think a link is extremely relevant to the phrase that you decided to search. For example:
a. Please click here to view my gallery of Chinese New Year's.
b. This year's Chinese New Year's photos really came out fantastic!
Choice b. - So Much Better.
3. Participate in other people's blogs and other web 2.0 sites. It's all about web 2.0 people, and even that is about to evolve. Web 2.0 is social media, where the public dictates and drives content, not the nerds behind the scenes typing away on a keyboard.
Blogs are a big part of 2.0, so are sites like YouTube, Digg, Myspace and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
So how do you incorporate your site? When you make comments, be sure to include your website URL, but also be sure to leave valid, engaging content. You don't want to look like a spammer because you're not. But spewing tripe like "Hey, nice pics!" on someone's blog is boring and doesn't engage. Blah.
Participate in Digg articles. Heck, write your own! If you have the writing skills use them to your advantage. Offer informative content (like a review of the new flash or new lens you just bought) with links back to your galleries and sites offering comparisons and examples.
Viewers like to see informative, engaging content. We as photographers start out at somewhat of a disadvantage because we deal in mostly images, but that doesn't mean there are tons of things out there you can't do to help make up for that!
4. Finally (and this is by no means the last, I just have to start getting ready for work ), when you do use keywords for your galleries and images, be sure that those keywords show up in the actual content in your descriptions!
Otherwise, consistently ignoring this principle will land you in the spam category in a search engine's eyes - and who wants that? (While some of the SEO issues are going on, I don't know how much of a difference this is gonna make. But it's a good habit to be in.)
Good Luck! I have a lot of this to do on my own! *sigh*
I thought about this quite a bit last night, the SEO problems and comparing Photoshelter to SmugMug.
Photoshelter has absolutely no SEO to speak of, and rarely will talk about this issue.
PS also cost twice as much as SM.
So, a switch just might be in order anyway.
There are certain areas where PS has SM beat hands down, ... but this SEO thing is key in my opinion, along with SM's lack in handling the meta data correctly.
Man, ... I desperately need more coffee here this morning before I write anymore!!
Stayed up all night editing.
Other worthwhile things that you can do while we have SEO issues with Smugmug:
1. Update your website often. If you have 50 shots to add to a gallery, do so slowly. Split it up into 2 or 3 groups of additions so that it looks like you have enough content to update almost every day or even every day.
2. If you have a blog and link back to to your galleries or individual pictures on smugmug, your ANCHOR TEXT is extremely important. Anchor text is tellling search engines that you think a link is extremely relevant to the phrase that you decided to search. For example:
a. Please click here to view my gallery of Chinese New Year's.
b. This year's Chinese New Year's photos really came out fantastic!
Choice b. - So Much Better.
3. Participate in other people's blogs and other web 2.0 sites. It's all about web 2.0 people, and even that is about to evolve. Web 2.0 is social media, where the public dictates and drives content, not the nerds behind the scenes typing away on a keyboard.
Blogs are a big part of 2.0, so are sites like YouTube, Digg, Myspace and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
So how do you incorporate your site? When you make comments, be sure to include your website URL, but also be sure to leave valid, engaging content. You don't want to look like a spammer because you're not. But spewing tripe like "Hey, nice pics!" on someone's blog is boring and doesn't engage. Blah.
Participate in Digg articles. Heck, write your own! If you have the writing skills use them to your advantage. Offer informative content (like a review of the new flash or new lens you just bought) with links back to your galleries and sites offering comparisons and examples.
Viewers like to see informative, engaging content. We as photographers start out at somewhat of a disadvantage because we deal in mostly images, but that doesn't mean there are tons of things out there you can't do to help make up for that!
4. Finally (and this is by no means the last, I just have to start getting ready for work ), when you do use keywords for your galleries and images, be sure that those keywords show up in the actual content in your descriptions!
Otherwise, consistently ignoring this principle will land you in the spam category in a search engine's eyes - and who wants that? (While some of the SEO issues are going on, I don't know how much of a difference this is gonna make. But it's a good habit to be in.)
Good Luck! I have a lot of this to do on my own! *sigh*
Ok--
I have been struggling with this issue for awhile as we can't seem to get people to the site either---while I don't think our photos will win any awards they really are not bad considering the photog in residence really doesn't do a lot of PS--and yes I know we/I can and need to load up on Keywords and Captions,etc...
But I digress from the topic at hand--after reading this post and many others-- I had a thought and am willing to look like an idiot by putting it out here for all to see and of course comment--
WHAT IF---I built a separate stand alone site or page with just a couple of pages and have everything in it link to or point to my SM site--like a 'false storefront'?? I could have domain extremely similar to our CN, maybe a sitemap of sorts, keywords,etc...
Now I don't know if this would even work technologically yet--BUT if it could maybe I can salvage our SM site and drive more traffic to us??
Thoughts anyone?
ps any thoughts on the site or photos would be ok too--
Thanks for sharing this! I have at least boosted my score from 54 to 78 with just a few changes! Can't hurt and at least now Yahoo search finds me where it wouldn't before! Thanks again.
Thanks for sharing this! I have at least boosted my score from 54 to 78 with just a few changes! Can't hurt and at least now Yahoo search finds me where it wouldn't before! Thanks again.
aw, that's great! Keep at it and you'll continue to see it improve.
WHAT IF---I built a separate stand alone site or page with just a couple of pages and have everything in it link to or point to my SM site--like a 'false storefront'?? I could have domain extremely similar to our CN, maybe a sitemap of sorts, keywords,etc...
Now I don't know if this would even work technologically yet--BUT if it could maybe I can salvage our SM site and drive more traffic to us??
Yes, that would work. That's essentially what Andy is telling us to do: put our pictures on other sites (blogs, Picasa, Flickr, or your own site entirely devoted to your photos) to increase findability. That's always a great idea. That's a separate issue, however, from the issue of why Google Image Search isn't crawling our images on this site.
You know, ..... it is very very hard for me to come in here and open up a Pro account when "it seems" that Admin can not address the SEO issue, which also looks like it has been a issue here for a long time.
I mean, ... give me a real, "no beat around the bush" answer on Google indexing issues!
I have a business to run, I actively market myself, and I always like seeing up to date and real answers that will help me even more with my business!
I'm not trashing, nor bashing, ... but I'm beginning to wonder!
Comments
I'm having trouble understanding this, can you explain please Andy ? Do you mean that you put all your images with Picasa, just some of them, are they all public ? Do yu have a Picasa site/album that you can refer us to?
Sorry if I'm missing something here :-((
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
Caroline, sorry I didn't reply before as I thought you had found the post already.
If you click on page 11 in this thread and look for entry 112, you will find the initial post by Andy regarding Picasa:)
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
This drives me nuts, I agree with you that images only seem to appear if they have been linked to in my blog, otherwise I've never found anything of mine in a google image search. Very disappointing considering the effort I have made in the past to keyword etc etc etc till I'm blue in the face.
Caroline
[quote=denisegoldberg
In my experience, my images pop up on a search on Google images if I have included a link to them in by blog. I don't see images pop up in an image search based on keywords on the photos. That still seems a bit odd to me, but I guess I just don't understand how the "global" image searches work.
I just did a search for you using your full name in quotes, and the first page of results look to be your photos - http://images.google.com/images?ndsp=21&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1T5GGLL_enUS272US272&q=%22caroline+shipsey%22&start=0&sa=N. Of course that's not the search you want to find your images, is it? I'm kind of assuming you're interested in getting hits on Mendip Hills as opposed to your name. To my searching eyes, it still appears that references to photos in blog entries is what helps get them into image search results.
--- Denise[/quote]
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
Exactly. The general consensus from all of us here is that we want to JUST use SmugMug and have Google Image Search find the pictures here.
Andy, you are 100% correct in saying that to maximize our visibility on the web that we should be putting links to our photos in blogs, forums, Picasa, Flickr, etc. However, I wasn't asking how to maximize my findability or other SEO things. My question is a purely technical one: why doesn't Google Image Search crawl SmugMug? Is it because the site uses AJAX for the images, and Google Image Search can't index catalogs as a result? Is there some other technical reason?
I used to have a Flickr account and my images did show up in Google Image Search. I got rid of my Flickr account and moved to SmugMug because SmugMug clearly beats Flickr in terms of features. But it is disappointing that while a free website seems to work just fine in terms of being indexed by Google Image Search, SmugMug does not.
out of mere curiosity do images on Zenfolio show up in google image search ?
In an effort to illustrate my point about the apparent fact that keywording seems to have had almost NO effect on increasing the findability of my photos on smugmug in Google Images or other search engines, here are some stats that I'd like to share so that we can discuss this in more detail as I think many of us feel that this is an extremely important issue.
Firstly, for those who may not know, there is a large discrepancy between Smugmug stats and Google analytics, and this has been explained to me before that it is due to the fact that google can not count instances of clicks on links to photos which are contained within forums, such as DGRIN. So my Smugmug stats always far outnumber my Google Analytics stats, meaning that there are many other smugmuggers who are visiting my galleries than there are visitors from other sources such as search engines. I think we are all very flattered when we have many visits from fellow Smugmuggers, but for Pro users who would like to get exposure for their photos BEYOND the Smugmug community, this is an issue.
After having read through the post on increasing findability on search engines by keywording, captioning, adding descriptions to galleries, and adding hidden gallery keywords, I spent many an hour diligently entering all this meta-data for my photos and galleries. The only thing I haven't done so far is start a blog.
However, despite all this hard work, the result of it from objective analysis of the stats, is essentially almost ZERO.
Let's look at the stats for my Smugmug over the last 9 days:
In total, there are over 40,000 hits for my photos, which normally, you'd be quite happy with. But let's look at where the traffic is coming from by looking at my Google Analytics for my site:
As you can see from the top line graph, for the month of February this year, I have anywhere between 20 to 70 visitors per day. Let's take a look at the stats for the source of traffic:
1. Direct Traffic - 41.78%
2. Referring Sites - 55.14%
3. Search Engines - 2.74%
Search Engines - 2.74%! From the links to Top Traffic Sources, you can see that most of the traffic is from within Smugmug or Dgrin itself. So from these stats, it does not appear that all the work I did in keywording etc etc made any difference whatsoever to increasing their findability in search engines.
Let's have a look at some more stats in detail:
Here, we can see that even when including the nearly the last 3 weeks of January, there were a total of 4 visits from Google Search. When I look at my source URLs, all 4 of those visits were from Google Keyword search and NOT from Google Image Search. That is, this confirms what I have been saying about my images not being findable in Google Image Search.
Finally, let's compare these stats to my Flickr Pro account stats as of today:
As you can see, Search Engines are responsible for 31% of my traffic, and Google Images and Yahooo Images each responsible for 13% of traffic to my Flickr photos. This is in huge contrast to the 2.74% that I get from my Smugmug pro account despite that fact that my photos in Smugmug are MUCH more detailed in keywords, captions, titles and descriptions than the vast majority of my Flickr photos.
I just wanted to present some statistics so that we can continue this discussion objectively and work out what is going wrong as I simply can not take it as fact that if we do all we were advised to do with respect to increasing findability, that the Search Engines would actually find us.
I'd love to hear thoughts from the Smugmug team as well as other Smugmuggers.
Thanks.
P.S It doesn't appear that this issue affects all Smugmug users, but there certainly seem to be many on this thread who are having very similar experiences to the one that I am having.
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
Anyone?
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
Hi Nelson,
Whilst I'm not as au fait with interpreting the Google Analytics reports, in general I see the same pattern for my site. I too worked hard at keywording, captioning etc and am similarly disappointed that it appeared to make no difference. I only have a few links to my site and have struggled to get those but otherwise I believe I have followed the instructions in this thread as best I can.
The idea of having to put some pics on Picasa really tees me off :-((
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
I agree with you. I have been concerned about this also as my Google analytics stats look a lot like yours.
Smugmug site
Blog Portfolio
Facebook
I see the same thing on my site that everyone else is reporting. I guess I really don't understand how the image searching on Google works. Or more specifically, I don't understand why it doesn't pick up keyworded pics from smug. Although it does (sometimes) pick up pics that I have posted in my blog...
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Any thoughts from Smugmug Support?
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
I'm not SmugMug support, but here's my guess. I looked at the source code for a picture in one of my galleries to see how it was put together, and as I suspected it was heavy on AJAX code. As a side effect of this, your picture name, caption, keywords etc. are not in the code at all. That info is loaded dynmaically via Javascript. The same goes for the image itself: the file name is not in the source code, the picture too is loaded dynamically.
Since Google Image Search looks for words close to the image file name in the page source code for indexing purposes, it can't find anything on SmugMug sites: the file name itself isn't in the source code, let alone anything nice like captions or keywords!
Contrast this with Flickr: viewing the page source for my one picture I have left, the file name of the image is clearly there, along with alt text for the image, and tags are nearby, just a bit farther down in the source code. If I search Google Images using the alt text of that image, it pops up immediately. If I search Google Images using the tags of that image, it also pops up. That's because Google can actually index those words since they are in the page source.
It would be nice to hear from SmugMug support so they could definitively say, "Yes, this is the problem." It'd be nicer for them to tweak the page source code so that the file name, captions, and keywords are all in the source so it could be indexed, or at least find some other way to make it visible to Google's crawlers. AJAX can be a pain in this way, although I did enjoy reading some of the comments in the source (like "// we do this for FF3, it is lame").
doctorgonzo, you may be on to something here with respect to the AJAX code. Do you know what element of a website involves the AJAX code? The reason I'm asking is that because some users are experiencing problems whilst others are not, it may be to do with features that the affected users have specifically on their website, such as an opening slideshow or something like that. I have no experience in code so I wouldn't know.
You're right, it would be nice to hear from Smugmug support so that we can have a discussion about it. I think Smugmug needs to acknowledge and accept that this is a problem first. Then we can try to work together to figure it out. They've been unusually quiet since I posted the examples of the Smugmug, Google, and Flickr stats up though.
Support guys...anyone have any thoughts on this?
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
With ref to your comment that some users are not experiencing problems,
I had been giving this some thought since yesterday and wonder if these people would join this thread and post their urls so the rest of us can get some idea of what we might be doing differently.
The absence of any comment or explanation from Smugmug, other than to keep referring us back to implementing the advice in the thread is not satisfactory.
You are in Australia and I am in the UK so our customers are unlikely to use Smugmug for prints etc, exchange rates, delivery times/charges being the main reasons. It doesn't matter as much to an event or wedding photographer whether a google image search returns a result for their images as it does to people in our situation.
The current economic situation that we in the UK are experiencing means that more than ever I need to make my money work for me. Spending $150 on my site and then to find that my images are not as visible as I need them to be is bad news.
Ok, if I'm doing something wrong then please TELL ME, don't keep on using the stock reply of implementing the advice of this thread etc etc because I honestly believe I have. It can't really be such a mystery can it ??
Caroline
BTW I've always found this is a bad time of day to get Smugmug's attention - they're still asleep :-)
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Hi Denise,
Thanks for the link, it makes very interesting reading though not very encouraging :-((
I guess those of us for whom this matters are all fighting a battle that we are unlikely to win.
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
Yes, I think that's a good idea. If anyone has had GOOD results with their Smugmug images being found on Google and Google Image Search, please let us know. Funnily enough, my page WAS number 1 on Google until recently without me having changed anything, and suddenly it's gone down to page 4 on search, and that is not even my home page, but some sub-gallery.
I also agree that if the system is broken, we should know about it so that at least we can stop wasting time keywording, captioning, and adding descriptions to every photo and gallery. Of course, for some of us and for potential customers, it will definitely influence the decision of whether or not to continue using Smugmug if it really means that your photos are essentially invisible online to everyone but the smugmug community.
Thanks Denise. I have posted in that thread as well to see if we can put everyone's heads together to get to the bottom of this.
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
Hi all!
Since I actually work for a company who's bread and butter is SEO I thought I would throw my hat into this discussion.
Caveat: I don't know code and I certainly don't know programming. However, I'm almost 2 years in this job and I do feel like I know some of the basics pretty well.
Let's start off with using some free tools out there on the web that help break down the SEO issue further.
Hubspot's Website Grader (no, I do not work for HubSpot)
1. I started out by entering www.smugmug.com as the URL to grade, and used www.flickr.com as a competitor.
Click here to view Smugmug's report
Click here to view Flickr's report
The biggest thing that stands out to me is the Page Rank: Smugmug's 7 versus Flicker's 9 (!).
(FYI, I don't know if anyone else has noticed but Google must've recently changed their page ranking algorithm because Smugmug's rank WAS 8 not too long ago and I know all of our websites for our company dropped 1 point as well. Just food for thought).
But for the sake of argument here, let's compare individual photographer's websites to see what kind of grades we get.
Click here to view Andy's report
Click here to view Shrekie's report
Andy has a grade of 90 while Shrekie has a grade of 39. Both of you also have flash elements for your home page and for some reason that is being applied to your meta description. That is wacky. Someone who knows code could explain this further. I don't know if that's "wrong" or "right" but for what it's worth, Flash is not SEO friendly. Having flash elements on your site is ok, which this is the case; but having a site that's purely flash can be detrimental if you don't know what you're doing.
(For anyone that doesn't know, your meta description is the 1-2 sentences of descriptive text that show up on SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages below your link).
Also, for what it's worth, my site only has a grade of 58 and there's a boat load of old tweaks and such from years ago when I had more time to fiddle with my site. Boy do I have some serious work ahead of me.
So here is a quick list of some problems that stand out to me:
1. alt tags are missing from images (this appears to happen with thumbnails that are displayed on the page)
2. the meta keywords on all of our sites default to Smugmug's home page. I believe this was brought up previously but this should be fixed. We all have different sites, purposes, and niche markets and having a standard group of keywords just ain't gonna work.
3. Another thing that bothers me is the file path for individual galleries. Now that could be something that can be overwritten with code somewhere, but I haven't had a whole lot of time to look further into this issue. For example:
yoursite.com/photogallery/brookgreen-gardens/rose-statue.jpg
is an SEO friendly file path while:
lookingglassphotography.com.au/gallery/4353182_hDz2w#256416510_57BrC
or
moonriverphotography.com/gallery/2096287_F8AHw#108167472_2NLZm
is FAR from SEO friendly. It's like that for everyone on Smugmug as far as I can tell.
4. Deprecated and invalid Code
If any of you have Chris Pederick's website tool plugin for firefox, you may have played around with Validating a page's HTML. Smugmug is full of errors across the board. And search engines like Google place a certain value on correct, error-free code.
For example, smugmug's home page has 32 errors and 40 warnings. A lot of this could be fixed easily if someone who knows their code well could go in and clean some things up (I know because a lot of the errors are easy fixes that even I could do with my limited knowledge of HTML).
Andy's home page has 54 errors, 96 warnings. I have 23 errors, 50 warnings. Shrekie has 22 errors, 40 warnings. And these are just home pages, each page you have has to contain valid HTML.
In Closing...
I know I haven't helped a whole lot since I can't actually get in there and make tweaks and changes or offer coding / programming advice like others can but I hope that some of this information may prove useful to some of you out there.
Thanks so much for your brilliant input into this discussion! The information and the links to objective statistics showing the difference in Google Rank between the two sites is really illuminating. I have just had a brief look over it all and will look at it in more detail tonight, but it appears that apart from having a blog, other worthwhile things to do is to submit links to delicious and digg, both of which make more sense than to replicate your images into another photo hosting site such as Picasa.
I just wanted to say a quick BIG THANK YOU and will look into this further tonight.
Still waiting to hear from Smugmug regarding this.
Website: www.lookingglassphotography.com.au
Blog: http://lookingglassphotography.posterous.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LookingGlassPho
I do actively market my work and I am doing just fine with that. Plenty of shooting to do which is why I was looking at a site that would be quick and easy to use.
But, ... good SEO is still a must!
Putting images on Picasa so Google can find them at SmugMug?
You're kidding, ............ right?
Did I mis-read something?
Hi Michael. I too am frustrated with the SEO issues right now but I've also been a pro customer for 4 years now and I did not choose Smugmug lightly.
Granted, 4 years ago I didn't know what SEO was. I was just looking for great features and great support - and I definitely found that here.
I suppose the funniest thing about the reports I put up in my previous post is that a lot of what Smugmug can do is simple. Time-consuming? Sure. But simple (like fixing deprecated code).
However, things like Cabinetbuff's response in the Flicker and Google thread are more complicated.
Bottom line though, is that when these issues are addressed and fixed Smugmug will at the very least stand stand by side with Flickr when it's all said and done.
Other worthwhile things that you can do while we have SEO issues with Smugmug:
1. Update your website often. If you have 50 shots to add to a gallery, do so slowly. Split it up into 2 or 3 groups of additions so that it looks like you have enough content to update almost every day or even every day.
2. If you have a blog and link back to to your galleries or individual pictures on smugmug, your ANCHOR TEXT is extremely important. Anchor text is tellling search engines that you think a link is extremely relevant to the phrase that you decided to search. For example:
a. Please click here to view my gallery of Chinese New Year's.
b. This year's Chinese New Year's photos really came out fantastic!
Choice b. - So Much Better.
3. Participate in other people's blogs and other web 2.0 sites. It's all about web 2.0 people, and even that is about to evolve. Web 2.0 is social media, where the public dictates and drives content, not the nerds behind the scenes typing away on a keyboard.
Blogs are a big part of 2.0, so are sites like YouTube, Digg, Myspace and Facebook, Twitter, etc.
So how do you incorporate your site? When you make comments, be sure to include your website URL, but also be sure to leave valid, engaging content. You don't want to look like a spammer because you're not. But spewing tripe like "Hey, nice pics!" on someone's blog is boring and doesn't engage. Blah.
Participate in Digg articles. Heck, write your own! If you have the writing skills use them to your advantage. Offer informative content (like a review of the new flash or new lens you just bought) with links back to your galleries and sites offering comparisons and examples.
Viewers like to see informative, engaging content. We as photographers start out at somewhat of a disadvantage because we deal in mostly images, but that doesn't mean there are tons of things out there you can't do to help make up for that!
4. Finally (and this is by no means the last, I just have to start getting ready for work
Otherwise, consistently ignoring this principle will land you in the spam category in a search engine's eyes - and who wants that? (While some of the SEO issues are going on, I don't know how much of a difference this is gonna make. But it's a good habit to be in.)
Good Luck! I have a lot of this to do on my own! *sigh*
I thought about this quite a bit last night, the SEO problems and comparing Photoshelter to SmugMug.
Photoshelter has absolutely no SEO to speak of, and rarely will talk about this issue.
PS also cost twice as much as SM.
So, a switch just might be in order anyway.
There are certain areas where PS has SM beat hands down, ... but this SEO thing is key in my opinion, along with SM's lack in handling the meta data correctly.
Man, ... I desperately need more coffee here this morning before I write anymore!!
Stayed up all night editing.
Thanks again,
Michael
(a little off topic-- maybe in the wrong thread?)
anywho. when i simply search my username (elsa) on smugmug i dont come up. por que?
:ivar
http://elsahaag.smugmug.com/
Ok--
I have been struggling with this issue for awhile as we can't seem to get people to the site either---while I don't think our photos will win any awards they really are not bad considering the photog in residence really doesn't do a lot of PS--and yes I know we/I can and need to load up on Keywords and Captions,etc...
But I digress from the topic at hand--after reading this post and many others-- I had a thought and am willing to look like an idiot by putting it out here for all to see and of course comment--
WHAT IF---I built a separate stand alone site or page with just a couple of pages and have everything in it link to or point to my SM site--like a 'false storefront'?? I could have domain extremely similar to our CN, maybe a sitemap of sorts, keywords,etc...
Now I don't know if this would even work technologically yet--BUT if it could maybe I can salvage our SM site and drive more traffic to us??
Thoughts anyone?
ps any thoughts on the site or photos would be ok too--
Thanks for sharing this! I have at least boosted my score from 54 to 78 with just a few changes! Can't hurt and at least now Yahoo search finds me where it wouldn't before! Thanks again.
Smugmug site
Blog Portfolio
Facebook
aw, that's great! Keep at it and you'll continue to see it improve.
Yes, that would work. That's essentially what Andy is telling us to do: put our pictures on other sites (blogs, Picasa, Flickr, or your own site entirely devoted to your photos) to increase findability. That's always a great idea. That's a separate issue, however, from the issue of why Google Image Search isn't crawling our images on this site.
I mean, ... give me a real, "no beat around the bush" answer on Google indexing issues!
I have a business to run, I actively market myself, and I always like seeing up to date and real answers that will help me even more with my business!
I'm not trashing, nor bashing, ... but I'm beginning to wonder!