You can simply ignore all the robots.txt or unreachable errors. Google will recrawl these the next time they come by. There's nothing to worry about as these are only temporary.
Sitemaps can't be updated manually. When you make a change to your site, your sitemap gets added to the list of sitemaps scheduled for an update. It can take a while for the sitemap to get updated. As far as I know a sitemap isn't intended as to be the sole directory by which search engines index your site, but rather a guideline to help search engine discover important content on your site. They still need to manually crawl the actual pages and during that will discover other more recent content.
Sitemaps can't be updated manually. When you make a change to your site, your sitemap gets added to the list of sitemaps scheduled for an update. It can take a while for the sitemap to get updated. As far as I know a sitemap isn't intended as to be the sole directory by which search engines index your site, but rather a guideline to help search engine discover important content on your site. They still need to manually crawl the actual pages and during that will discover other more recent content.
For 10 weeks now my sitemaps have told Google that my most important pages are galleries that do not exists and keywords that do not exists.
I agree this should be quicker. Without the sitemap it will take google a long long time to index my site.
My problem is that my site for a long time was setup as an island with google indexing being blocked.
I recently changed this and decided to open up my site to the world as I found may people were getting to my site via a search in google. so my site index has very little
I'm not sure you can blame Smugmug. Perhaps there is still something wrong with the smugmug sitemaps, perhaps there is not. I'm not in a good a position to tell something about this because I'm a complete outsider BUT I do know something about SEO etc. (though I'm not an expert either). From my Statcounter stats I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools spidered my web site just once after Smugmug launched the sitemaps (yes indeed ONE single time). It's up to Google to spider web sites... so it goes!
I do have other e-commerce web sites and the basic rule is that you should NOT force anything re SEO because chances are the search engines (SE) interpret this as spam. In SEO, you must be patient and remain conservative. It took MONTHS for some bots to spider my web site. IF SE penalize your site for spamming, you may forget to ever be included in the search engine. That would be detrimental, wouldn't it?
Aren't we sometimes too used to being served INSTANTLY? Shouldn't we all learn more patience now and then?
I'm sure Smugmug will take a look at this after posting concerns but I also noticed too often on this forum that one blames Smugmug for so-called errors that are not on their end (I think of the Facebook like button; most people do not make any difference between the Facebook "share button" and the Facebook "like button" and what web sites are allowed to do with it by Facebook). Most of us are photographers, no SEO or internet experts or programmers -- that's why we expect Smugmug to be the expert in the fields (or have them).
im getting lots of visits by the spiders now judging by the information in google webmaster but i still have red cross's by the index and galleries sitemaps.
Is this a smug mug problem or a google problem? there was talk that the sitemaps exceeded googles limits?
I'm not sure you can blame Smugmug. Perhaps there is still something wrong with the smugmug sitemaps, perhaps there is not. I'm not in a good a position to tell something about this because I'm a complete outsider BUT I do know something about SEO etc. (though I'm not an expert either). From my Statcounter stats I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools spidered my web site just once after Smugmug launched the sitemaps (yes indeed ONE single time). It's up to Google to spider web sites... so it goes!
I do have other e-commerce web sites and the basic rule is that you should NOT force anything re SEO because chances are the search engines (SE) interpret this as spam. In SEO, you must be patient and remain conservative. It took MONTHS for some bots to spider my web site. IF SE penalize your site for spamming, you may forget to ever be included in the search engine. That would be detrimental, wouldn't it?
Aren't we sometimes too used to being served INSTANTLY? Shouldn't we all learn more patience now and then?
I'm sure Smugmug will take a look at this after posting concerns but I also noticed too often on this forum that one blames Smugmug for so-called errors that are not on their end (I think of the Facebook like button; most people do not make any difference between the Facebook "share button" and the Facebook "like button" and what web sites are allowed to do with it by Facebook). Most of us are photographers, no SEO or internet experts or programmers -- that's why we expect Smugmug to be the expert in the fields (or have them).
Luc
Those are valid points and if this thread were not directly related to using the webmaster tools to kick start the process. I would agree 100% but since the these thread instructions are focused on webmaster tools and having a valid up to date site map to have google crawl your site using the base\site map.
Yes, I am patiently watching the stats in the webmaster tools. It is a very slow process without the sitemap. I am also watching for when my sitemap may update. Then and only then will I re-submit to the webmaster tools. Based on what we are seeing that could take many months.
Example #2 Seems to be pulling from our footer.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
Doha Photographer. ... Sequin Miner's Home. Slideshow. Connect with us ...
Example #3 seems to be pulling gallery keywords.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
Doha Photographer : Photo Keywords : doha photographer.
Example #4 seems to like our navbar.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
... G A L L E R I E S; |; P U B L I S H E D; |; C L I E N T S; |; V I D E O S; |; A B O U T; |; C O N T A C T; |; B L O G. Home ...
Question, any idea why were not pulling the page description on returns? Any idea what we should change in smug to point the "hit" to return the page title and am just starting to research H1 Html tags. Am I completely lost and should let the page title handle this? Finally, looking for the place to edit the Site Description (the first 20 or so words that show up in a google return)
Thanks for any advance help and we LOVE Smugmug! LOVE IT!
Hi Andy, (Love that the COO actually answers 4th page forum posts overnight! Naysayers, show me ANY other company with this level of support not to mention product offering)!!
All righty then, "pulling" = What google is showing on a search result below our page title. ie, search Moon River and google returns: "7 Dec 2005 ...Moon River Photography by Andy Williams. Fine art and landscape photography. Private instruction in NYC and workshops worldwide."
as a description.
Comparing your Source to ours answers the question, this is the Description field (=metaname) in gallery settings. Sorry all, our problem was simply a matter of being consistent across all pages. Guessing that galleries which DIDNT have a description, caption, or keyword, it returned footer, navbar information etc... Ok no worries! Edited, submitted, will wait for update.
Quick question, Back to H1 tags... Am under the impression that you can code in HTML with an H1 designation which will give that line highest importance, (description) assuming then that Smug codes the Page Title H1 and the Description HTML H2 or equivalent?
Trying to figure out the right area where we need to have our target keywords. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (seriously, you guys rock)
Hi Andy, (Love that the COO actually answers 4th page forum posts overnight! Naysayers, show me ANY other company with this level of support not to mention product offering)!!
All righty then, "pulling" = What google is showing on a search result below our page title. ie, search Moon River and google returns: "7 Dec 2005 ...Moon River Photography by Andy Williams. Fine art and landscape photography. Private instruction in NYC and workshops worldwide."
as a description.
Comparing your Source to ours answers the question, this is the Description field (=metaname) in gallery settings. Sorry all, our problem was simply a matter of being consistent across all pages. Guessing that galleries which DIDNT have a description, caption, or keyword, it returned footer, navbar information etc... Ok no worries! Edited, submitted, will wait for update.
Quick question, Back to H1 tags... Am under the impression that you can code in HTML with an H1 designation which will give that line highest importance, (description) assuming then that Smug codes the Page Title H1 and the Description HTML H2 or equivalent?
Trying to figure out the right area where we need to have our target keywords. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (seriously, you guys rock)
Let google find the album descriptions naturally - that'll have the biggest weight, and no h1s are needed.
1. Explain, how Google will index archived sitemap? I am not a webmaster (and I do not use Google webmasters tools), but I have never seen sitemap in this form, as on SmugMug-Sites. Usually it looks so:
etc. (and it will be updated at least once a week).
2. What do you think about the last lines in the file robots.txt (located by all at address - http://YourSmugMugSite.smugmug.com/robots.txt (please replace YourSmugMugSite on Your own name):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots.
The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site
and
To exclude all robots from the entire server
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
And we can check, how Google (and other searchengines) will index our sites here - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/se-bot-simulator.html All links will be closed - "Restricted with robots.txt". Perhaps this is why Google is not correct and not fast index images on sites, that are located here?
Sorry for the delayed answer to your two questions.
1. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking for. The way I understand it, Google will index your sitemap and use it for assistance in crawling your site. Once the sitemap gets updated, Google will notice and re-index the sitemap.
You can't manually influence when the sitemap on our end is updated. If you make changes to your site, we'll notice that and mark your sitemap for updating. It'll take time for our system to update your sitemap.
2. The robots.txt file is seen sequentially by crawlers. So if a crawler finds itself listed in it, should follow the instructions given and ignore the rest of the file that doesn't concern it.
Only if a crawler doesn't fit itself specified in the robots.txt file, it'll get to the end:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
and follow those instructions by not indexing the site.
At this point we only allow crawlers that are specifically listed in the robots.txt file. We may expand the list in the future.
As I explained to you in your ticket, I'm not familiar with the bot simulator that you linked to and can't say how it works. But it doesn't seem to return real life results for Google. Google is allowed on SmugMug which you can see in the robots.txt file with the various known Google bots we allow. To our best knowledge, the Google user agents listed in the robots.txt file are the ones required for Google to perform what they are doing.
And you can verify that Google works on your own site by signing up for the free Google Webmasters tool. It shows me that Google has proper access to all parts of my site open to crawlers.
The Google image search example you bring up doesn't really proof your point. It takes more than just allowing Google to index your site to get into Google Image search. I'm not aware of the specifics, but I'm sure if you search, you can come up with lots of discussions on Google Image search.
Point is if Google weren't able to index Andy's site, there wouldn't be more than 190,000 results in the Google Web search for his domain: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Amoonriverphotography.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
I kindly ask You to consider (including in the future) the following circumstances:
- I have never decide my PERSONAL issues in public forums;
- I have never PERSONALLY asked you anything to answer me;
- I have never got any answers from You.
And:
- I said - "perhaps". This is not a statement;
- "Once the sitemap gets updated ..." - they (sitemaps) are not updated for several months;
- Google is not the same thing, that Yahoo!, Bing and other searchengines;
- "Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google" (С) and not on Yahoo!, Bing and other searchengines;
- Participation in Google Webmaster Tools is not the responsibility for every citizen;
- Html-pages is not the same, as photos, located oh html-pages.
And finally:
Your answer even for a 0.01% solves the problem of improving the indexing of images (photos)?
I've been trying to figure out some of this too, and just do not understand it. In almost every image search I try for my photos, my works on SmugMug simply come up much farther back than practically every other site I'm on, even though everything I read about SEO tells me my SmugMug stuff should be in the first pages. I'm talking about..... even when I put in my site name, various combos of my own name, or add those to gallery keywords or site keywords or photo keywords... very little shows up in image searches from my Smug site. It just doesn't make sense. I have more links back to Smug than anywhere else, am not on any other basic or comprehensive photo-hosting sites like this, and I do all the right things as far as labeling. I have WAY more stuff here than anywhere else, am much more active on my site, etc.
But on nearly every kind of search I do if I choose Images, other sites where I have photos (even ones I haven't touched for months) come up first. Those sites are ones like FineArtAmerica, RedBubble, & Panoramio, as well as Etsy & several of my stock sites. I can understand the last two, perhaps. But if I look for "Anna Lisa Yoder photos" (not in quotes) I don't see why my SmugMug site isn't all over the place. One of the earliest photos to keep coming up in image searches with my name or site name is this silly family snapshot: http://www.winsomeworks.com/Family/Reunions/Hunsberger-Mini-Reunion/8335422_4GyRQ/4/546264563_ikqcb#546264563_ikqcb . Why? It makes no sense. It has no filename besides the out-of-camera one. There's nothing in the keywords or captions with my name. It's just a random snap in a random gallery where my name is, if anything, less prominent than on hundreds if not thousands of other photos of mine.
Is it a good idea to put your sitename and actual name in all your keywords? Or maybe gallery keywords? I've wondered whether this would help. Otherwise, I just don't see why Smug is so far back in image searches.
I'm sorry, I may have confused you with a different user on the helpdesk.
What I'm saying about the simulator tool you linked to is that it doesn't seem very accurate in its reports. The way I read its output it suggests that I have blocked Google my site by showing almost everything in the "restricted by robots.txt" section.
Yet that's not true as following my robots.txt file, only the following urls are restricted for the Googlebot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /VIP/
Disallow: /vip/
Disallow: /search/
(http://www.sebastianhosche.com/robots.txt)
So I really don't know how the bot simulator would come to the result of listing all the internal links as restricted on my site. They may be looking for the wrong user agent.
Google's hown help documents say that their Googlebot user agent is Googlebot: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449
(check the "Manually create a robots.txt file" section for details)
If the "bot simulator" can't return accurate results for Google, why should it be working properly on other search engines?
On your data you included, you have to keep in mind that with our Pro and Power account level, comes the ability to add a custom domain. Since Google indexes content only once, the sites with custom domains are likely not included in your data.
Personally, I'd keep on doing what you do and not add redundant keywords as this could be considered keyword spaming by search engines and could only hurt your ranking. Add only relevant keywords to a photo.
Apart from captioning and keywording on your site, it's even more important to get external sites linking to you. I see you already started a blog, I would just go in and update it regularly with photos and posts that link back to the photo in the gallery.
Also try to get other sites to link to you by maybe teaming up with another photographer / blog.
In addition, I'd also recommend registering for the Google Webmasters service as it provides info on what pages are linking to your site or through what search terms visitors came to your site.
Personally, I'd keep on doing what you do and not add redundant keywords as this could be considered keyword spaming by search engines and could only hurt your ranking. Add only relevant keywords to a photo.
Apart from captioning and keywording on your site, it's even more important to get external sites linking to you. I see you already started a blog, I would just go in and update it regularly with photos and posts that link back to the photo in the gallery.
Also try to get other sites to link to you by maybe teaming up with another photographer / blog.
In addition, I'd also recommend registering for the Google Webmasters service as it provides info on what pages are linking to your site or through what search terms visitors came to your site.
Sebastian
I do all this, except the last. I haven't updated my blog lately because I need to take time to figure out the stupid formatting. It gets all screwed up. Denise helped me a lot w/ it, but I haven't been able to take the time to work through her suggestions yet. Anyway, all this still doesn't make sense though, because my photos are keyworded a lot the same on any site I'm on, and my point is that I'm doing WAY less on any of those other sites... and have much less work. So why should they all come up first? There are also way fewer links to any of those other sites. Any site that I have linking to my photos, I always point it first to SmugMUg. There just seems to be something that shoves Smug way back in the image search list. And none of this answers why some weird random snapshot with less search relevance than 1000s of others on my site would show up in so many searches of my name or site name + photos. I just can't make 2 + 2 =4 here.
Comments
Sorry--I forgot to attach the screen shot of all the robot text errors.
Jean Chang Photography
www.jeanachang.blogspot.com
You can simply ignore all the robots.txt or unreachable errors. Google will recrawl these the next time they come by. There's nothing to worry about as these are only temporary.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
<lastmod>2010-08-09T16:52:35Z</lastmod>
www.robertsnyderphotography.com
Sitemaps can't be updated manually. When you make a change to your site, your sitemap gets added to the list of sitemaps scheduled for an update. It can take a while for the sitemap to get updated. As far as I know a sitemap isn't intended as to be the sole directory by which search engines index your site, but rather a guideline to help search engine discover important content on your site. They still need to manually crawl the actual pages and during that will discover other more recent content.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
10 weeks without a sitemap update. http://lichtenhansen.smugmug.com/sitemap-index.xml
This is just unacceptable.
A sitemap tells google which pages are important.
For 10 weeks now my sitemaps have told Google that my most important pages are galleries that do not exists and keywords that do not exists.
Panoramio: Spectacular photos on Google Earth
Google: Allan Hansen - fotograf og IT-nørd
Blogs: Photo and SEO news by LichtenHansen, Allan Hansen foto nyheder, Antarctica Travel
Homepage: Fotograf Allan Hansen, Unusual wildlife photos
I agree this should be quicker. Without the sitemap it will take google a long long time to index my site.
My problem is that my site for a long time was setup as an island with google indexing being blocked.
I recently changed this and decided to open up my site to the world as I found may people were getting to my site via a search in google. so my site index has very little
<sitemap>
<loc>http://go.skactionpix.com/sitemap-base.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2010-08-09T07:44:39Z</lastmod>
</sitemap>
basemap
<url>
<loc>http://go.skactionpix.com</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
I do have other e-commerce web sites and the basic rule is that you should NOT force anything re SEO because chances are the search engines (SE) interpret this as spam. In SEO, you must be patient and remain conservative. It took MONTHS for some bots to spider my web site. IF SE penalize your site for spamming, you may forget to ever be included in the search engine. That would be detrimental, wouldn't it?
Aren't we sometimes too used to being served INSTANTLY? Shouldn't we all learn more patience now and then?
I'm sure Smugmug will take a look at this after posting concerns but I also noticed too often on this forum that one blames Smugmug for so-called errors that are not on their end (I think of the Facebook like button; most people do not make any difference between the Facebook "share button" and the Facebook "like button" and what web sites are allowed to do with it by Facebook). Most of us are photographers, no SEO or internet experts or programmers -- that's why we expect Smugmug to be the expert in the fields (or have them).
Luc
Is this a smug mug problem or a google problem? there was talk that the sitemaps exceeded googles limits?
Those are valid points and if this thread were not directly related to using the webmaster tools to kick start the process. I would agree 100% but since the these thread instructions are focused on webmaster tools and having a valid up to date site map to have google crawl your site using the base\site map.
Yes, I am patiently watching the stats in the webmaster tools. It is a very slow process without the sitemap. I am also watching for when my sitemap may update. Then and only then will I re-submit to the webmaster tools. Based on what we are seeing that could take many months.
SEO Rookie but starting to see Smug Sitemaps and Keywording paying dividends in Google (THANK YOU!!) Description Question:
Example #1 pulls the previous (recently edited, but this is the right place) page title edited in Customizer.
Portfolio - Doha Qatar Photographers ...
Doha Qatar Professional Photographer, Advertising, Annual Reports, Architecture, Executive Portraits, Industrial, Energy.
Example #2 Seems to be pulling from our footer.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
Doha Photographer. ... Sequin Miner's Home. Slideshow. Connect with us ...
Example #3 seems to be pulling gallery keywords.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
Doha Photographer : Photo Keywords : doha photographer.
Example #4 seems to like our navbar.
Doha Qatar Photographers, Architectural ...
... G A L L E R I E S; |; P U B L I S H E D; |; C L I E N T S; |; V I D E O S; |; A B O U T; |; C O N T A C T; |; B L O G. Home ...
Question, any idea why were not pulling the page description on returns? Any idea what we should change in smug to point the "hit" to return the page title and am just starting to research H1 Html tags. Am I completely lost and should let the page title handle this? Finally, looking for the place to edit the Site Description (the first 20 or so words that show up in a google return)
Thanks for any advance help and we LOVE Smugmug! LOVE IT!
www.sequinminer.com
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
All righty then, "pulling" = What google is showing on a search result below our page title. ie, search Moon River and google returns: "7 Dec 2005 ... Moon River Photography by Andy Williams. Fine art and landscape photography. Private instruction in NYC and workshops worldwide."
as a description.
Comparing your Source to ours answers the question, this is the Description field (=metaname) in gallery settings. Sorry all, our problem was simply a matter of being consistent across all pages. Guessing that galleries which DIDNT have a description, caption, or keyword, it returned footer, navbar information etc... Ok no worries! Edited, submitted, will wait for update.
Quick question, Back to H1 tags... Am under the impression that you can code in HTML with an H1 designation which will give that line highest importance, (description) assuming then that Smug codes the Page Title H1 and the Description HTML H2 or equivalent?
Trying to figure out the right area where we need to have our target keywords. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (seriously, you guys rock)
Let google find the album descriptions naturally - that'll have the biggest weight, and no h1s are needed.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
(my first post on this forum)
Andy, I am very sorry, but please:
1. Explain, how Google will index archived sitemap? I am not a webmaster (and I do not use Google webmasters tools), but I have never seen sitemap in this form, as on SmugMug-Sites. Usually it looks so:
http://www.kaltura.org/sitemap.xml
http://www.nexxt.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.izandi.net/sitemap.xml
http://www.maxi-juegos.com/sitemap.xml
etc. (and it will be updated at least once a week).
2. What do you think about the last lines in the file robots.txt (located by all at address - http://YourSmugMugSite.smugmug.com/robots.txt (please replace YourSmugMugSite on Your own name):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
and
from http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html (of. site)
And we can check, how Google (and other searchengines) will index our sites here - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/se-bot-simulator.html All links will be closed - "Restricted with robots.txt". Perhaps this is why Google is not correct and not fast index images on sites, that are located here?
Here is Your site - http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=1&q=site%3Amoonriverphotography.com%2F&btnG=Search
I venture to suggest, that You have more galleries, than Your photos, indexed by Google.
Thanks in advance.
cman
Sorry for the delayed answer to your two questions.
1. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking for. The way I understand it, Google will index your sitemap and use it for assistance in crawling your site. Once the sitemap gets updated, Google will notice and re-index the sitemap.
You can't manually influence when the sitemap on our end is updated. If you make changes to your site, we'll notice that and mark your sitemap for updating. It'll take time for our system to update your sitemap.
2. The robots.txt file is seen sequentially by crawlers. So if a crawler finds itself listed in it, should follow the instructions given and ignore the rest of the file that doesn't concern it.
Only if a crawler doesn't fit itself specified in the robots.txt file, it'll get to the end:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
and follow those instructions by not indexing the site.
At this point we only allow crawlers that are specifically listed in the robots.txt file. We may expand the list in the future.
As I explained to you in your ticket, I'm not familiar with the bot simulator that you linked to and can't say how it works. But it doesn't seem to return real life results for Google. Google is allowed on SmugMug which you can see in the robots.txt file with the various known Google bots we allow. To our best knowledge, the Google user agents listed in the robots.txt file are the ones required for Google to perform what they are doing.
And you can verify that Google works on your own site by signing up for the free Google Webmasters tool. It shows me that Google has proper access to all parts of my site open to crawlers.
The Google image search example you bring up doesn't really proof your point. It takes more than just allowing Google to index your site to get into Google Image search. I'm not aware of the specifics, but I'm sure if you search, you can come up with lots of discussions on Google Image search.
Point is if Google weren't able to index Andy's site, there wouldn't be more than 190,000 results in the Google Web search for his domain:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Amoonriverphotography.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
I kindly ask You to consider (including in the future) the following circumstances:
- I have never decide my PERSONAL issues in public forums;
- I have never PERSONALLY asked you anything to answer me;
- I have never got any answers from You.
And:
- I said - "perhaps". This is not a statement;
- "Once the sitemap gets updated ..." - they (sitemaps) are not updated for several months;
- Google is not the same thing, that Yahoo!, Bing and other searchengines;
- "Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility on Google" (С) and not on Yahoo!, Bing and other searchengines;
- Participation in Google Webmaster Tools is not the responsibility for every citizen;
- Html-pages is not the same, as photos, located oh html-pages.
And finally:
Your answer even for a 0.01% solves the problem of improving the indexing of images (photos)?
Only data (according to Google):
Flickr: indexed images - 2,150,000,000 / indexed pages - 668,000,000 / ratio - 3,2
Webshots: indexed images - 259,000,000 / indexed pages - 123,000,000 / ratio - 2,1
PBase: indexed images - 17,700,000 / indexed pages - 21,300,000 / ratio - 0,8
Fotki: indexed images - 1,250,000 / indexed pages - 2,560,000 / ratio - 0,5
Ipernity: indexed images - 1,260,000 / indexed pages - 4,540,000 / ratio - 0,27
Smugmug: indexed images - 2,030,000 / indexed pages - 20,400,000 / ratio - 0,1
Thanks for attention.
But on nearly every kind of search I do if I choose Images, other sites where I have photos (even ones I haven't touched for months) come up first. Those sites are ones like FineArtAmerica, RedBubble, & Panoramio, as well as Etsy & several of my stock sites. I can understand the last two, perhaps. But if I look for "Anna Lisa Yoder photos" (not in quotes) I don't see why my SmugMug site isn't all over the place. One of the earliest photos to keep coming up in image searches with my name or site name is this silly family snapshot: http://www.winsomeworks.com/Family/Reunions/Hunsberger-Mini-Reunion/8335422_4GyRQ/4/546264563_ikqcb#546264563_ikqcb . Why? It makes no sense. It has no filename besides the out-of-camera one. There's nothing in the keywords or captions with my name. It's just a random snap in a random gallery where my name is, if anything, less prominent than on hundreds if not thousands of other photos of mine.
Is it a good idea to put your sitename and actual name in all your keywords? Or maybe gallery keywords? I've wondered whether this would help. Otherwise, I just don't see why Smug is so far back in image searches.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
I'm sorry, I may have confused you with a different user on the helpdesk.
What I'm saying about the simulator tool you linked to is that it doesn't seem very accurate in its reports. The way I read its output it suggests that I have blocked Google my site by showing almost everything in the "restricted by robots.txt" section.
Yet that's not true as following my robots.txt file, only the following urls are restricted for the Googlebot:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /VIP/
Disallow: /vip/
Disallow: /search/
(http://www.sebastianhosche.com/robots.txt)
So I really don't know how the bot simulator would come to the result of listing all the internal links as restricted on my site. They may be looking for the wrong user agent.
Google's hown help documents say that their Googlebot user agent is Googlebot:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449
(check the "Manually create a robots.txt file" section for details)
If the "bot simulator" can't return accurate results for Google, why should it be working properly on other search engines?
On your data you included, you have to keep in mind that with our Pro and Power account level, comes the ability to add a custom domain. Since Google indexes content only once, the sites with custom domains are likely not included in your data.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
Personally, I'd keep on doing what you do and not add redundant keywords as this could be considered keyword spaming by search engines and could only hurt your ranking. Add only relevant keywords to a photo.
Apart from captioning and keywording on your site, it's even more important to get external sites linking to you. I see you already started a blog, I would just go in and update it regularly with photos and posts that link back to the photo in the gallery.
Also try to get other sites to link to you by maybe teaming up with another photographer / blog.
In addition, I'd also recommend registering for the Google Webmasters service as it provides info on what pages are linking to your site or through what search terms visitors came to your site.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
I do all this, except the last. I haven't updated my blog lately because I need to take time to figure out the stupid formatting. It gets all screwed up. Denise helped me a lot w/ it, but I haven't been able to take the time to work through her suggestions yet. Anyway, all this still doesn't make sense though, because my photos are keyworded a lot the same on any site I'm on, and my point is that I'm doing WAY less on any of those other sites... and have much less work. So why should they all come up first? There are also way fewer links to any of those other sites. Any site that I have linking to my photos, I always point it first to SmugMUg. There just seems to be something that shoves Smug way back in the image search list. And none of this answers why some weird random snapshot with less search relevance than 1000s of others on my site would show up in so many searches of my name or site name + photos. I just can't make 2 + 2 =4 here.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Who gave you this advice?
Why do other sites have /sitemap-images.xml.gz but mine doesn't? It gives a 404 error when submitting as sitemap to GWT.
Will this make it harder for Google to index my images? But really, I just want to know why some sites produce an images sitemap but my doesn't
Still waiting for a response from SM.
Please see the sticky thread in this forum.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=190216
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
I do not need your "sitemap".
Please see articles about feed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
and allow indexing of it.
P.S. Make a request to include your files (robots.txt, sitemap-index.xml) in the Guinness Book of Records.