interesting google observation

dogwood

So google has definitely changed the way SM pages are listed-- and it's actually great news for me-- and hopefully the rest of us!

Instead of listing my site with the generic SM "The ultimate in photo sharing. Online photo albums, photo sharing, photo hosting..." message in the description, google is now grabbing the description off my bio and using it! :clap

This is fantastic! It means you can make the first sentence in your bio be the description of your site when it's listed in google (yahoo looks like it's doing the same thing)! :barb

My bio is hidden, but I purposely worded it heavily for SEO and no offense SM, but I like my description ("The best fashion photography in Portland, Oregon") a whole lot more than "The ultimate in photo sharing..."!

I realize SM had nothing to do with this, but it's a lil' bonus "feature" many, many, many of us have wanted for a long time and now good ol' google gave it to us!

jfriend

It was Smugmug that did this

dogwood wrote:

So google has definitely changed the way SM pages are listed-- and it's actually great news for me-- and hopefully the rest of us!

Instead of listing my site with the generic SM "The ultimate in photo sharing. Online photo albums, photo sharing, photo hosting..." message in the description, google is now grabbing the description off my bio and using it!

This is fantastic! It means you can make the first sentence in your bio be the description of your site when it's listed in google (yahoo looks like it's doing the same thing)!

My bio is hidden, but I purposely worded it heavily for SEO and no offense SM, but I like my description ("The best fashion photography in Portland, Oregon") a whole lot more than "The ultimate in photo sharing..."!

I realize SM had nothing to do with this, but it's a lil' bonus "feature" many, many, many of us have wanted for a long time and now good ol' google gave it to us!

Actually, it looks like Smugmug had everything to do with this and Google is just responding to the Smugmug changes. It appears that Smugmug is now populating the meta tags from your Bio description. That is very cool.

Your home page now has this HTML in it (asterisks show instead of <> chars):

*head*
    *meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /*
    *meta name="description" content="Portland, Oregon fashion and portrait photographer Pete Springer is among the best fashion photographers in the Pacific Northwest.  Fashion models, boutiques, designers, and fashion show organizers all benefit from the creative skills and photos from Pete Springer Photography. From fashion shows to fashion shoots, they're unique and stylish.  For capturing the unique character of Oregon or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, there's nothing better than Pete Springer fashion photography, Portland, Oregon.  Pete Springer Photography also does portraits, landscapes, and documentary photography." /*
    *meta name="keywords" content="online photo albums, photo sharing, photo hosting, photo storage, albums, photo albums, photo, sharing, picture sharing, share photos, photo galleries, photo gallery, photos, photographs, online gallery, picture gallery, picture galleries, online galleries, smugmug gallery, smugmug, smug mug, smugmug photos, images, image galleries, image gallery, gallery hosting, galleries hosting, hosting" /*
    *meta name="robots" content="all, index, follow" /*

jfriend

I just confirmed that text you put in your Bio description will go into the

*meta name="description" content="Your Bio Text here" /*

tag, even if your Bio isn't enabled on your home page. That's quite cool.

Andy

jfriend wrote:

Actually, it looks like Smugmug had everything to do with this

dogwood

Andy wrote:

Holy smokes, Andy! That is awesome! We (and I think I can speak for others) appreciate this tremendously. It's much, much better than the ol' "photo sharing" description.

urbanaries

Andy wrote:

oh crap, I put my PIN number in my bio and hid it, thinking it was safe!

Just kidding, this is an awesome new development, for those of us who had bigger fish to fry than figure out the coding workaround up to now!

caroline

dogwood wrote:

Holy smokes, Andy! That is awesome! We (and I think I can speak for others) appreciate this tremendously. It's much, much better than the ol' "photo sharing" description.

I still have the old 'photo sharing site etc' why is that ?

Caroline

jfriend

caroline wrote:

I still have the old 'photo sharing site etc' why is that ?

Caroline

On your site, I see a title that says:

"Mendip Hills Photography by Caroline Shipsey-Landscape & Life in the AONB - powered by SmugMug"

and

metadata with a description of:

"Hello & Welcome!Please feel free to browse my portfolio & galleries. You can buy prints & digital downloads, and commission an assignment on this site. I specialise in landscape and documentary photography of the English countryside, especially of the Mendip Hills, South West England.
Use KEYWORDS or SEARCH to quickly find an image. If you have any questions, just contact me by email or telephone 01749 671167 All images are © Caroline Shipsey."

which is the exact text from your Bio.

If you don't see this yet in a Google search, it's just because Google takes a little while to re-index pages that change.
</pre>

javier.rinaldi

so... theoretically, we could add a text div in the bio (with our website description) hide it (via display:hidden) and this text would appear in google searches.

jfriend

jfriend wrote:

I just confirmed that text you put in your Bio description will go into the

*meta name="description" content="Your Bio Text here" /*

tag, even if your Bio isn't enabled on your home page. That's quite cool.

I started looking at the pages besides the home page. Here's what I found:

• In a page that lists a bunch of categories, the meta description is still the text from the Bio.
• In a page that lists a bunch of galleries, the meta description is still the text from the Bio.
• In a gallery with a title, but no description, the meta description is back to the old Smugmug thing that has nothing to do with your galleries.
• In a gallery with a title and a description, the meta description is the text from the description.

So, overall it looks like a big improvement. The one thing that doesn't quite look right to me is when there's no description for a gallery, the meta description goes back to it's old default. Shouldn't it just use the gallery name if there's no description. That would give everyone's search results a personal touch rather than the generic Smugmug line.

caroline

jfriend wrote:

On your site, I see a title that says:

"Mendip Hills Photography by Caroline Shipsey-Landscape & Life in the AONB - powered by SmugMug"

and

metadata with a description of:

"Hello & Welcome!Please feel free to browse my portfolio & galleries. You can buy prints & digital downloads, and commission an assignment on this site. I specialise in landscape and documentary photography of the English countryside, especially of the Mendip Hills, South West England.
Use KEYWORDS or SEARCH to quickly find an image. If you have any questions, just contact me by email or telephone 01749 671167 All images are © Caroline Shipsey."

which is the exact text from your Bio.

If you don't see this yet in a Google search, it's just because Google takes a little while to re-index pages that change.

Thank you for the reply John.

So am I right in assuming that what actually goes into the bio text is much more important than I, for example have realised (thought it was just a cheery hello) and fine tuning this will be beneficial in terms of being found by someone using Google to search ?
Am I understanding this ?
Caroline

jfriend

caroline wrote:

Thank you for the reply John.

So am I right in assuming that what actually goes into the bio text is much more important than I, for example have realised (thought it was just a cheery hello) and fine tuning this will be beneficial in terms of being found by someone using Google to search ?
Am I understanding this ?
Caroline

Yes, as of a week ago, Smugmug is putting text from you Bio into some meta tags on some of your Smugmug pages and those meta tags definitely influence how Google ranks you and displays your results.

scwalter

jfriend wrote:

Yes, as of a week ago, Smugmug is putting text from you Bio into some meta tags on some of your Smugmug pages and those meta tags definitely influence how Google ranks you and displays your results.

I may have missed this (and I just searched) but was this documented somewhere?

Thanks,
Scott

Scott_Quier

scwalter wrote:

I may have missed this (and I just searched) but was this documented somewhere?

Thanks,
Scott

I missed this as well. Is there a clearing house for this sort of information that I have yet to find?

Thanks.

Andy

scwalter wrote:

I may have missed this (and I just searched) but was this documented somewhere?

Thanks,
Scott

Release notes blog:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/

Subscribe to it and you will get the updates as they are made. Onethumb needs to update the last few releases, sorry it's lagged

claudermilk

Thanks for the heads-up on that. I needed to tweak my bio since I started the code with a style definition. Looked awful in Google. Once their spiders hit my site again all is well--I added a nice hidden div right up front just for Google's consumption & the meta tag picks it up perfectly.

iamback

dogwood wrote:

So google has definitely changed the way SM pages are listed-- and it's actually great news for me-- and hopefully the rest of us!

Instead of listing my site with the generic SM "The ultimate in photo sharing. Online photo albums, photo sharing, photo hosting..." message in the description, google is now grabbing the description off my bio and using it!

I'm not too happy about that! My Bio is about me, not about my site.

iamback

jfriend wrote:

Yes, as of a week ago, Smugmug is putting text from you Bio into some meta tags on some of your Smugmug pages and those meta tags definitely influence how Google ranks you and displays your results.

So SmugMug is doing that, not Google!

Meh, even worse.
And don't forget that Google isn't the only search engine in the world - different search engines do different things with meta description.

But please, let me decide what goes into my meta descriptions!

jfriend

iamback wrote:

So SmugMug is doing that, not Google!

Meh, even worse.
And don't forget that Google isn't the only search engine in the world - different search engines do different things with meta description.

But please, let me decide what goes into my meta descriptions!

Yeah, this baffles me a bit. I don't know why Smugmug didn't just give folks complete control over their meta description in the control panel. What they have implemented so far is essentially a hack that gives some users better meta descriptions than they had and gives you some hacker level control over some of it, but certainly isn't how you would design it from scratch.

I'm with you. Why didn't they just put this into the control panel and let you set the meta name, description and keywords that you want. Some of it should be algorithmic because you probably want category and gallery names/descriptions to be included.

For me, I don't display the Bio on my homepage field so I do have direct control over the meta description (by just putting the desired text into the Bio field), but only on some screens and I still have no control over the meta name or the meta keywords.