Give me my money back

Niphotos · February 3, 2011

Smugmug really has let me down , not for the first time , 1,655 of my URLS are not now seen by Google as they are restricted by the robots.txt file , my images have all but dissapeared from the search engines , 347 of my URLS are now unreachable and all i get from Smugmug are lame excuses and the refusal to refund my hard earned money , i know what programme i will not be recommending to my friends , poor show Smugmug , or am i the mug for paying you money ????? :pukeMakes me sick !!!

Andy · February 3, 2011

Hi, I'm sorry you are upset. As Twoofy has explained, we're making changes to sitemaps as we speak. He's been responding here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1550392#post1550392

SmugMug sites get unbelievably high search results. ONe thing that Google may not like is the overdone # of spammy search words here http://www.niphotos.com/County-Down-photographs-and/Northern-Ireland-Photos-and/13055156_wwrfF#1130485129_VsG7z in the album description - dunno if you've done that throughout your site. It's far better to put a more real, more potent album description there. Have you done everything we suggest here? http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ?

If you're of a mind to leave, I don't want to stop you - and I'll be happy to work with you, just write me, http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal ATTN: Andy

But I'd love to see you stay, and get your SEO improved.

Twoofy · February 3, 2011

Hello Joe,

The URLs that are being removed are ones I can almost guarantee you do not want traffic going to. We are trying to make things better here. We monitor our traffic religiously and we are plugging some holes that are sending traffic to places you really don't want it to go.

- Greg

Niphotos · February 6, 2011

Sitemaps and Robots.txt mistakes
Sorry Andy , but this is now totally rubbish , i now have over two thousand urls restricted by robots.txt and 312 not found , see my screenshots taken today , this has gone from bad to worse , i live beside one of the top web page designers in Ireland and he agrees that there is something dramaticly wrong , please try and get this sorted out once and for all as it is not right , you know it and i know it regards Joe

robots txt 6th feb.jpg

Andy wrote: »

Hi, I'm sorry you are upset. As Twoofy has explained, we're making changes to sitemaps as we speak. He's been responding here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1550392#post1550392

SmugMug sites get unbelievably high search results. ONe thing that Google may not like is the overdone # of spammy search words here http://www.niphotos.com/County-Down-photographs-and/Northern-Ireland-Photos-and/13055156_wwrfF#1130485129_VsG7z in the album description - dunno if you've done that throughout your site. It's far better to put a more real, more potent album description there. Have you done everything we suggest here? http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ?

If you're of a mind to leave, I don't want to stop you - and I'll be happy to work with you, just write me, http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal ATTN: Andy

But I'd love to see you stay, and get your SEO improved.

Niphotos · February 6, 2011

And theres more !! denied by robots.txt
And there is more Andy , the pages denied by robots.txt , when i put them onto the Google " fetch as Googleboot" they all come up as " Denied by Robots.txt" are you trying to tell me that after several months with my pages going reasonbly well and only a few alterations that suddenly over 2,000 urls are now denied by Google and this is my fault ??............. not according to expert web designers who all agree that there is something wrong with the way that the robot.txt is written ..............please sort this out soon ........Regards Joe

Andy wrote: »

Hi, I'm sorry you are upset. As Twoofy has explained, we're making changes to sitemaps as we speak. He's been responding here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1550392#post1550392

SmugMug sites get unbelievably high search results. ONe thing that Google may not like is the overdone # of spammy search words here http://www.niphotos.com/County-Down-photographs-and/Northern-Ireland-Photos-and/13055156_wwrfF#1130485129_VsG7z in the album description - dunno if you've done that throughout your site. It's far better to put a more real, more potent album description there. Have you done everything we suggest here? http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines ?

If you're of a mind to leave, I don't want to stop you - and I'll be happy to work with you, just write me, http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal ATTN: Andy

But I'd love to see you stay, and get your SEO improved.

Andy · February 6, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

.............please sort this out soon ........Regards Joe

As Greg posted, we're making mods to the whole sitemaps thing, and what Googlebot crawls on your site. We just need you to be patient. In the meantime, SEO on SmugMug continues to rise. And I've offered you assistance by email from the help desk, if you'd' like it. Or should I close that ticket? Thanks.

Niphotos · February 6, 2011

This is what i always get , that you are making adjustments !!!...SEO on my site is not rising ............it is going down !!.............you can e-mail me if you want with any help options , but the fact remains that it is Smugmug's fault that i now have over TWO THOUSAND url's rejected by Google due to a problem with the robots.txt , something i did not create , your company did !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, seems i have been misold a product , i have been patient for over six months now , my images are no longer on any search engines , when will the problems with my site , and others whom have e-mailed me , be fixed , thats what i pay for !!!!!! Regards Joe ,,,,,,no smilies attached .......nothing to smile about as my site ratings continue to fall

Andy wrote: »

As Greg posted, we're making mods to the whole sitemaps thing, and what Googlebot crawls on your site. We just need you to be patient. In the meantime, SEO on SmugMug continues to rise. And I've offered you assistance by email from the help desk, if you'd' like it. Or should I close that ticket? Thanks.

Andy · February 6, 2011

Hello. You are not reading what we've written. The changes are such that we've asked Google not to crawl those urls (you don't want them crawled). Until things get fully changed over, there will be errors in webmaster tools. If you continue to do EVERYTHING we've said on our http://smugmug.com/help/search-engines page your SEO will improve. I guarantee it. But these temporary errors are NOT causing your SEO to decline. As I wrote to you from the help desk, if you wish to leave, let me know. But I encourage you to stay, and to do the things we recommend.

Andy · February 6, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

This is what i always get , that you are making adjustments !!!...SEO on my site is not rising ............it is going down !!.............you can e-mail me if you want with any help options , but the fact remains that it is Smugmug's fault that i now have over TWO THOUSAND url's rejected by Google due to a problem with the robots.txt , something i did not create , your company did !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, seems i have been misold a product , i have been patient for over six months now , my images are no longer on any search engines , when will the problems with my site , and others whom have e-mailed me , be fixed , thats what i pay for !!!!!! Regards Joe ,,,,,,no smilies attached .......nothing to smile about as my site ratings continue to fall

Again - you're putting spammy keywords in the album description, and hiding them (not good). Keyword naturally. The album description is a huge thing that Google sees and searches off of.

http://www.niphotos.com/County-Armagh-photographs-and/County-Armagh-photographs-and/13068557_AH5X6#1136823654_pGcJD

Twoofy · February 6, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

This is what i always get , that you are making adjustments !!!...SEO on my site is not rising ............it is going down !!.............you can e-mail me if you want with any help options , but the fact remains that it is Smugmug's fault that i now have over TWO THOUSAND url's rejected by Google due to a problem with the robots.txt , something i did not create , your company did !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, seems i have been misold a product , i have been patient for over six months now , my images are no longer on any search engines , when will the problems with my site , and others whom have e-mailed me , be fixed , thats what i pay for !!!!!! Regards Joe ,,,,,,no smilies attached .......nothing to smile about as my site ratings continue to fall

Joe,

I am not sure you are reading what I am saying entirely. It is fully expected that these URLs would no longer appear in your sitemaps. Do you really want us sending traffic to pages that do not showcase your photography, or allow people to buy them?

Click this URL: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=site:niphotos.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 -- as you can see there are 11,700 pages in Google's index for your site. We are continually making changes and adjustments to increase this number - and more important to drive traffic to more relevant pages.

I wish we had the ability to leave your website's SEO in the state it is now - and let everyone else enjoy the improvements that are being made. That seems to be what you want (why I do not know). But, unfortunately it is just not possible.

- Greg

Allen · February 6, 2011

site:photosbyat.com shows 13,100 results for my site. But why is Google finding
keywords and pages from my family galleries in which every one is password protected.

Twoofy · February 6, 2011

Allen wrote: »

site:photosbyat.com shows 13,100 results for my site. But why is Google finding
keywords and pages from my family galleries in which every one is password protected.

I will look into this next week, that does sound strange. Thanks for letting us know about it!

- Greg

Allen · February 6, 2011

Twoofy wrote: »

I will look into this next week, that does sound strange. Thanks for letting us know about it!

- Greg

Could it be picking up the terms/links in my header html where I have many
navbars? Also 13 out of the first 20 Significance keywords are from my family
galleries.

Niphotos · February 9, 2011

no images on google ...why ????.compensation please
Yes i can see all that you see , none of my images now appear on Google , thats what i see !!!!........... seems money wasted with Smugmug , all the time my urls are being restricted by robots.txt , i did not create the robots.txt , your company did , thats what i see ,this url is a small image of a boat http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943207_NGQLq/Small denied by robots.txt want more ?? here is another one http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943695_B2oiY/Large again denied by robots.txt , solution????????????? get it fixed or refund my money with compensation , simple solution .....Joe
destroyed.jpg

Twoofy wrote: »

Joe,

I am not sure you are reading what I am saying entirely. It is fully expected that these URLs would no longer appear in your sitemaps. Do you really want us sending traffic to pages that do not showcase your photography, or allow people to buy them?

Click this URL: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=site:niphotos.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 -- as you can see there are 11,700 pages in Google's index for your site. We are continually making changes and adjustments to increase this number - and more important to drive traffic to more relevant pages.

I wish we had the ability to leave your website's SEO in the state it is now - and let everyone else enjoy the improvements that are being made. That seems to be what you want (why I do not know). But, unfortunately it is just not possible.

- Greg

Andy · February 9, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

Yes i can see all that you see , none of my images now appear on Google , thats what i see !!!!........... seems money wasted with Smugmug , all the time my urls are being restricted by robots.txt , i did not create the robots.txt , your company did , thats what i see ,this url is a small image of a boat http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943207_NGQLq/Small denied by robots.txt want more ?? here is another one http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943695_B2oiY/Large again denied by robots.txt , solution????????????? get it fixed or refund my money with compensation , simple solution .....Joe
destroyed.jpg

Hi, the rejected urls are not in ANY WAY affecting images being picked up by Google Image Search. That is completely different thing.

I've already communicated with you from the help desk, we'd love you to stay but if you've a mind to leave, just reply to my note, thanks.

Andy · February 9, 2011

MakeMeShutter wrote: »

Can somebody please explain in terms I can understand what is going on with all these restricted urls.
As well as why I am currently seeing the caution marks with the exclaimation points in them in my sitemaps.
Are sitemaps still being worked on?
I would really like to understand but am having a hard time wrapping my brain around this.

Thanks in advance,
--Shawn

We've explained this numerous times to you and others

YES, sitemaps are being worked on. The rejected URLs are links to stuff you don't want indexed - we're focusing all the google juice on your homepage and galleries. We're in the midst of changes to sitemaps and what we feed to Google. The errors are to be expected and harmless right now.

Yes, we continue to work on improving findability of images via Google Image Search (this is TOTALLY different than the awesome level of SEO and findability for SmugMug sites and galleries and pages).

Thanks.

Niphotos · February 9, 2011

Facts.................
The rejected URLS which i have shown you contain the images and keywords of that image , and YES they are affecting my image score in Google , i have not recieved any note from you , you know my e-mail address , do i want the info in the url http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943207_NGQLq/Small seen by Google , yes of course i do !!!!! it contains the info about that image and my site along with the TWO THOUSAND other urls from my site that Google cannot pick up because of the restricted robots.txt and it seems my site is not the only one being affected .. something is wrong somewhere and it is not of my doing ......Regards Joe

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Andy wrote: »

Hi, the rejected urls are not in ANY WAY affecting images being picked up by Google Image Search. That is completely different thing.

I've already communicated with you from the help desk, we'd love you to stay but if you've a mind to leave, just reply to my note, thanks.

Andy · February 9, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

The rejected URLS which i have shown you contain the images and keywords of that image , and YES they are affecting my image score in Google , i have not recieved any note from you , you know my e-mail address ,

They do not affect Google Image Search one bit.

I and Greg Saylor (our engineer) replied to your ticket #227913 on Feb 3. We've emailed you from our help desk.

jfriend · February 9, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

The rejected URLS which i have shown you contain the images and keywords of that image , and YES they are affecting my image score in Google , i have not recieved any note from you , you know my e-mail address , do i want the info in the url http://www.niphotos.com/date/1969-12-31/2011-01-28/2/1070943207_NGQLq/Small seen by Google , yes of course i do !!!!! it contains the info about that image and my site along with the TWO THOUSAND other urls from my site that Google cannot pick up because of the restricted robots.txt and it seems my site is not the only one being affected .. something is wrong somewhere and it is not of my doing ......Regards Joe

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Something Smugmug has not explained here is that there are literally hundreds of Smugmug URLs that all get one to the same content. For the best SEO, it is generally not a good idea to have multiple forms of URLs that all go to the same content. It's better for SEO to have one consistent URL that takes you to a particular piece of content. It appears that smugmug is working on robots.txt as we speak to work on this particular issue. Believe me, you do not want Google indexing all of these separate URLs which all lead to the same set of images because doing so will lower your SEO not raise it:

http://www.niphotos.com/Holidays/Lanzarote-photographs/13079210_d9n5c#1070943207_NGQLq
http://www.niphotos.com/gallery/13079210_d9n5c#1070943207_NGQLq
http://www.niphotos.com/gallery/whateveryouwanthere/13079210_d9n5c#1070943207_NGQLq
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/13079210_d9n5c#1070943207_NGQLq

So, some URLs should be restricted. Plus, if Smugmug allows Google to find each image 10 different ways, that also costs 10x more to handle the Google spiders which can (and has in the past) affected site performance as the spiders went nuts crawling duplicate things that didn't really need to be crawled.

As for what smugmug is actually working on and what acknowledged issues they have right now, it would be a whole lot easier for everyone if they'd just explain what's going on and why. Obviously there are issues. Obviously they are working on something related to this. A little communication about what is actually being worked on and why (specifics, not generalities) and when some results can be expected could help a lot with anxious customers.

Andy · February 9, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

Something Smugmug has not explained here

That's precisely what we're doing here

Minimizing the crawls to irrelevant stuff and focusing on the important stuff. Thanks.

Andy · February 9, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

As for what smugmug is actually working on and what acknowledged issues they have right now, it would be a whole lot easier for everyone if they'd just explain what's going on and why. Obviously there are issues. Obviously they are working on something related to this. A little communication about what is actually being worked on and why (specifics, not generalities) and when some results can be expected could help a lot with anxious customers.

I have. Twoofy has. We have been answering every question on Sitemaps and what we're doing. Thank you!

jfriend · February 9, 2011

Andy wrote: »

I have. Twoofy has. We have been answering every question on Sitemaps and what we're doing. Thank you!

Never mind. I'm done arguing with you today.

If you want to point me to any post in this thread from anyone that says specifically what issues you are fixing and when customers can expect to see those fixes, I'd be happy to read it.

Andy · February 9, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

Never mind. I'm done arguing with you today.

If you want to point me to any post in this thread from anyone that says specifically what issues you are fixing and when customers can expect to see those fixes, I'd be happy to read it.

This thread, and other threads with active sitemap questions. We've answered and addressed them every day.

jfriend · February 9, 2011

Andy wrote: »

This thread, and other threads with active sitemap questions. We've answered and addressed them every day.

So, when can customers expect to see their sitemaps and restricted URLs fixed? I can't find any post that says that.

Andy · February 9, 2011

jfriend wrote: »

So, when can customers expect to see their sitemaps and restricted URLs fixed? I can't find any post that says that.

MANY posts from us were in 'robots txt unreachable' thread. I've closed that thread and put a pointer to this sticky http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=190216

We've been ON TOP of this thank you.

Niphotos · February 9, 2011

Did not recieve that e-mail at my personal e-mail address , can u resend it ......Joe

Andy wrote: »

They do not affect Google Image Search one bit.

I and Greg Saylor (our engineer) replied to your ticket #227913 on Feb 3. We've emailed you from our help desk.

Andy · February 9, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

Did not recieve that e-mail at my personal e-mail address , can u resend it ......Joe

you can also go here, http://help.smugmug.com/tickets/227913

Niphotos · February 10, 2011

Sorry but your expanation is totally wrong , the url here http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large is of a photo hich shows Cushendun harbour and the keywords for it , it has been restricted by the robots.txt , are you seriously telling me that this is right , total rubbish !!!!!!!!!!!, i paid good hard earned money to your company for the privelage of getting my images and photos on the web , all i get are excuses and fob offs , my images do not now appear on Google because of the robots.txt stopping them , THAT IS FACT !!!!!!!!FACT.jpg

Andy wrote: »

you can also go here, http://help.smugmug.com/tickets/227913

Andy · February 10, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

Sorry but your expanation is totally wrong , the url here http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large is of a photo hich shows Cushendun harbour and the keywords for it , it has been restricted by the robots.txt , are you seriously telling me that this is right , total rubbish !!!!!!!!!!!, i paid good hard earned money to your company for the privelage of getting my images and photos on the web , all i get are excuses and fob offs , my images do not now appear on Google because of the robots.txt stopping them , THAT IS FACT !!!!!!!!FACT.jpg

Hi. I'm sorry you are upset, and you don't seem to be willing to allow us to further improve things. If you wish, reply to my offer by email from the help desk, and we'll handle things from there.

Otherwise, we'd love you to stay. Please have patience while we improve even further how Google crawls SmugMug sites.

SEO on SmugMug is VERY VERY HIGH! Go search for my name. There's a very famous singer that has the same name :uhoh yet I land on page one of Google results. http://www.google.com/search?q=andy+williams&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

mbrady · February 11, 2011

Niphotos wrote: »

Sorry but your expanation is totally wrong , the url here http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large is of a photo hich shows Cushendun harbour and the keywords for it , it has been restricted by the robots.txt , are you seriously telling me that this is right , total rubbish !!!!!!!!!!!, i paid good hard earned money to your company for the privelage of getting my images and photos on the web , all i get are excuses and fob offs , my images do not now appear on Google because of the robots.txt stopping them , THAT IS FACT !!!!!!!!FACT.jpg

First off, I'm not a Smugmug employee, so these are just my own comments:
When someone Googles for your photos, do you want the resulting links to go to the photo as seen in its actual gallery, or to the photo in the midst of a keyword gallery that doesn't have the same look and feel or settings as the gallery that actually contains the photo?

For example, open one of your galleries, look at a photo and click a keyword below the photo to get the keyword gallery of other photos. Do you really want visitors to your site landing at that keyword gallery instead of the real gallery? And the same story for date range galleries, RSS feed links, etc.

In your example, do you want people who are trying to find your photos to land here (where only one photo is visible and people may leave after seeing that one photo):
http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large

or here, where they can easily see other photos in the same gallery and possible select and purchase a different photo in the same gallery:
http://www.niphotos.com/County-Antrim-photographs-and/Photographs-of-County-Antrim/13079201_iZM6x#954652749_Rsdst

The robots.txt file is not blocking access to that photo, it's blocking that specific URL to the photo in the keyword gallery. That will then allow Google to have nice clean links to your photo in its actual gallery in their index. That's what people would then find when doing a Google search.

Niphotos · February 12, 2011

Then maybe you can explain to me why in the past three weeks my images have all but dissapeared from Google along with the majority of my pages , Mountstewart house and gardens when searched for on Google was on page 1 just a few weeks ago , now ...............lucky if it is on page5 ..............that is what is wrong !!!!!........... 2312 urls on my site restricted by robots.txt is not right , even i know that ! . only 19 urls in the web index according to Google , compared to 253 only three weeks ago !!..................sorry something wrong here

mbrady wrote: »

First off, I'm not a Smugmug employee, so these are just my own comments:
When someone Googles for your photos, do you want the resulting links to go to the photo as seen in its actual gallery, or to the photo in the midst of a keyword gallery that doesn't have the same look and feel or settings as the gallery that actually contains the photo?

For example, open one of your galleries, look at a photo and click a keyword below the photo to get the keyword gallery of other photos. Do you really want visitors to your site landing at that keyword gallery instead of the real gallery? And the same story for date range galleries, RSS feed links, etc.

In your example, do you want people who are trying to find your photos to land here (where only one photo is visible and people may leave after seeing that one photo):
http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large

or here, where they can easily see other photos in the same gallery and possible select and purchase a different photo in the same gallery:
http://www.niphotos.com/County-Antrim-photographs-and/Photographs-of-County-Antrim/13079201_iZM6x#954652749_Rsdst

The robots.txt file is not blocking access to that photo, it's blocking that specific URL to the photo in the keyword gallery. That will then allow Google to have nice clean links to your photo in its actual gallery in their index. That's what people would then find when doing a Google search.

Give me my money back

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