Mangled Google search result

StardustPhoto · March 22, 2010

Why, when I search for my website through Google, does the result for www.stardustphotographystudio.com come up with the title 'SmugMug Photo & Video Sharing. You look better here.' and the description 'The ultimate in photo & video sharing. Easily create online photo albums. Share, store, organize and print.'? All listed for 'www.stardustphotographystudio.com', which is correct.

I really don't like the idea of people searching for the studio, only to be confused by what looks like our page but with Smugmug's slogan plastered all over the description.

I definitely set up the description section in my control panel, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good.

richpepp · March 22, 2010

It is possible that Google just hasn't indexed your site again yet. The first link that comes up for you was indexed on the 5th of March so maybe your changes were after that. Bing seems to have something much more sensible for you so my guess is that you have done the changes correctly

Rich

Erick L · March 22, 2010

Galleries without description often show results with SM's slogan. I've asked SM to remove it for 2 years but their response is "add your description".

Erick L · March 22, 2010

BTW, searching for your site, the homepage description is fine. If people are looking for a wedding photographer, they will likely find your homepage. If they are searching for your studio, they already know it exists and probably just lost/forget the adress so a bad description isn't too worrying. It's more of a problem if you rely on deep searches by random visitors.

Andy · March 22, 2010

Erick L wrote:

Galleries without description often show results with SM's slogan. I've asked SM to remove it for 2 years but their response is "add your description".

Which makes perfect sense, since the description is information that Google indexes for each gallery

jfriend · March 22, 2010

Andy wrote:

Which makes perfect sense, since the description is information that Google indexes for each gallery

I beg to differ. I have no problem using the gallery description if one exists, but if one does not exist, it does not make sense that, for a pro account, you put Smugmug's generic description into our page just because we don't need a gallery-specific description for that gallery. We have a category. We have a gallery title. Sometimes the viewer doesn't need more.

Why not put our home page meta data that we've set? After all, we've already told you that that is our default meta data and we don't want your Smugmug advertising meta data for our home page. It would make much more sense to use that than the use the default Smugmug promotion metadata.

Besides, when I have an event like this, why should I have to add a gallery description to every gallery. It simply isn't needed, it would be a lot of busy work and it would detract from the sub-category display. I've already told you what I want my default meta data to be (entered it into the control panel).

Andy · March 22, 2010

jfriend wrote:

I beg to differ. I have no problem using the gallery description if one exists, but if one does not exist, it does not make sense that, for a pro account, you put Smugmug's generic description into our page just because we don't need a gallery-specific description for that gallery. We have a category. We have a gallery title. Sometimes the viewer doesn't need more.

Why not put our home page meta data that we've set? After all, we've already told you that that is our default meta data and we don't want your Smugmug advertising meta data for our home page. It would make much more sense to use that than the use the default Smugmug promotion metadata.

Besides, when I have an event like this, why should I have to add a gallery description to every gallery. It simply isn't needed, it would be a lot of busy work and it would detract from the sub-category display. I've already told you what I want my default meta data to be (entered it into the control panel).

All I meant was that having a description will improve searchability, John. We have 100s of pros writing us regularly and coming up to us in person at shows saying how awesome their search results are. It's working and working well.

We'll see about adding homepage meta or something else if the pro leaves the description blank.

But don't for a second think we that we don't think this through - daily, weekly, all the time.

jfriend · March 22, 2010

Andy wrote:

Because having a description will improve searchability, John. We have 100s of pros writing us regularly and coming up to us in person at shows saying how awesome their search results are. It's working and working well.

We'll see about adding homepage meta or something else if the pro leaves the description blank.

But don't for a second think we that we don't think this through - daily, weekly, all the time.

I'm fine with using the description if one is present - that makes sense.

But, if there is no gallery-specific description you cannot argue that you thought it through and decided that is was better for the pro or for SEO if you used the generic Smugmug description when the pro had already filled in a specific homepage metadata. I'm not buying that. Ask 50 pros and you'll find 50 people who would rather have their own metadata than yours. And, their own metadata is more specific to their site so it has to be better for their SEO too.

Andy · March 22, 2010

jfriend wrote:

I'm fine with using the description if one is present - that makes sense.

But, if there is no gallery-specific description you cannot argue that you thought it through and decided that is was better for the pro or for SEO if you used the generic Smugmug description when the pro had already filled in a specific homepage metadata. I'm not buying that. Ask 50 pros and you'll find 50 people who would rather have their own metadata than yours. And, their own metadata is more specific to their site so it has to be better for their SEO too.

Thanks John!

LichtenHansen · March 22, 2010

Meta descriptions – just follow the recommendations from Google
From Google: Changing your site's title and description in search results

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn't very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google's search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

Dear Smugmug,
Why not follow the recommendations from Google?

Andy · March 22, 2010

LichtenHansen wrote:

Dear Smugmug,
Why not follow the recommendations from Google?

We allow customers to set the description, Jfriend made an excellent suggestion which I've already logged in our system.

BigRed · March 31, 2010

Andy wrote:

We allow customers to set the description, Jfriend made an excellent suggestion which I've already logged in our system.

I second John's suggestion, but please, apply it to Power users as well. Just because we don't sell photos from our Smugmug sites doesn't mean we don't care about our Google presentation.

Which system is that logged in? If User Voice, I'd like to cast some votes. Thanks!

Andy · April 2, 2010

Psst Jfriend and Erick L:
http://releasenotes.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/04/01/ipad%E2%84%A2-app-seo-new-stats-and-bug-fixes/

Erick L · April 2, 2010

This means that if you have a gallery description entered in your gallery settings, we’ll use that first. If not, then we use your site meta description, which you can set in your Control Panel’s Settings tab

Fantastic. And that was fast!

I'm gonna run out of things to whine about.

Andy · April 2, 2010

Erick L wrote:

I'm gonna run out of things to whine about.

BigRed · April 6, 2010

Big Improvement in SEO

Andy wrote:

Psst Jfriend and Erick L:
http://releasenotes.blogs.smugmug.com/2010/04/01/ipad%E2%84%A2-app-seo-new-stats-and-bug-fixes/

This change may not get a lot of attention, but I think it represents a big step up in how professionally the Smugmug environment is perceived. So much depends on how we are found and presented on Google, and those cheesy ads were just plain embarrassing. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

"...if you have a gallery description entered in your gallery settings, we’ll use that first. If not, then we use your site meta description, which you can set in your Control Panel’s Settings tab. If you have entered neither, then search results will display our default SmugMug phrase."

Andy · April 6, 2010

BigRed wrote:

This change may not get a lot of attention, but I think it represents a big step up in how professionally the Smugmug environment is perceived. So much depends on how we are found and presented on Google, and those cheesy ads were just plain embarrassing. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

We're really happy you guys keep pushing us to fix up these things. Thanks!

Mangled Google search result

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