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
I'm not a Smugmug employee either so these are just some of my observations. When I look at your site, I see 12 galleries. So, counting the homepage and your rather redundant category pages (that each seem to have only one gallery in them), it looks to me like your site consists of 25 actual pages of original content (homepage + 12 category pages + 12 gallery pages). That same content can be seen in many other views (by keyword, by date, popular, by search, etc...), but it isn't new content and it may just dilute your content on Google if it's all indexed by Google. Some galleries may have sub-pages if they contain lots of images (not sure how that is served to Google and how Google handles that).
When I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens" on Google, you show up on page 3 for me. What you need more than anything is other good sites linking to you. Google knows what's on your pages. What moves you up in the rankings is how precisely you match the user's search and how important it thinks your pages are relative to the other things that match. That has nothing to do with how many total pages from your site it has indexed and has everything to do with what the exact content of those pages is and how much of the rest of the web knows about your pages. When I look at the links on page 1 of the Google results, they are all pages dedicated to Mount Stewart House and Gardens with lots of text describing them. #1 is the Wikipedia page. #2 is the National Trust page. These are pages that have significant relevant content and probably have lots of other sites linking to them. When you look at the hits on page 1, do you legitimately think you should rank ahead of them? I know you want to, but do you really think you should?
FYI, a search for "site:niphotos.com" on Google returns 11,500 results, many of which include things restricted in the robots file so Google may not be fully up-to-date on your site yet after recent changes.
Mostly, I think you need to realize that Google ranking is not a contest to see how many pages you can put in its index. You want to make sure that Google knows about all your content and that no page of original content is missed, but for what I see of your site that's approx 25 pages. Then, you need to make sure all the right stuff is in those pages. And, lastly and just as importantly, you need to make sure that lots of other sites on the internet are linking to you. The more important and well known those sites are and the more relevant to what your site is about, the better for you.
Even more interesting, if I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens photos" (note the addition of the word "photos"), you are #2 in Google. Google has figured out that you're a photo site and the others are not. Hmmm. I think Google's doing what it's supposed to. If people are searching for information on Mount Stewart House and Gardens, those other sites have a lot more info than you do. If people are searching for photos of it, you win. I wonder if you might play better in the information search if you had lots more text information on the places - not just text spammed into corners in your galleries, but actual information pages. You could add some description pages (using gallery HTML pages) for each location that contain a bunch of useful info and then linked directly to your gallery from it. You could even embed some of the photos in the description pages using custom HTML.
You could also contact all the other sites offering information about the places you have photos of and offer them a link to your photos so their visitors could see more what the places are like. If they aren't competitors, they might think it's useful for their visitors even if you have a commercial angle.
Crap , absolute crap , my website has been destroyed by Smugmug , you fail to explain why so many of my urls are now resticted by the robots.txt , again and agian GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK , Smugmug directors , GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm not a Smugmug employee either so these are just some of my observations. When I look at your site, I see 12 galleries. So, counting the homepage and your rather redundant category pages (that each seem to have only one gallery in them), it looks to me like your site consists of 25 actual pages of original content (homepage + 12 category pages + 12 gallery pages). That same content can be seen in many other views (by keyword, by date, popular, by search, etc...), but it isn't new content and it may just dilute your content on Google if it's all indexed by Google. Some galleries may have sub-pages if they contain lots of images (not sure how that is served to Google and how Google handles that).
When I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens" on Google, you show up on page 3 for me. What you need more than anything is other good sites linking to you. Google knows what's on your pages. What moves you up in the rankings is how precisely you match the user's search and how important it thinks your pages are relative to the other things that match. That has nothing to do with how many total pages from your site it has indexed and has everything to do with what the exact content of those pages is and how much of the rest of the web knows about your pages. When I look at the links on page 1 of the Google results, they are all pages dedicated to Mount Stewart House and Gardens with lots of text describing them. #1 is the Wikipedia page. #2 is the National Trust page. These are pages that have significant relevant content and probably have lots of other sites linking to them. When you look at the hits on page 1, do you legitimately think you should rank ahead of them? I know you want to, but do you really think you should?
FYI, a search for "site:niphotos.com" on Google returns 11,500 results, many of which include things restricted in the robots file so Google may not be fully up-to-date on your site yet after recent changes.
Mostly, I think you need to realize that Google ranking is not a contest to see how many pages you can put in its index. You want to make sure that Google knows about all your content and that no page of original content is missed, but for what I see of your site that's approx 25 pages. Then, you need to make sure all the right stuff is in those pages. And, lastly and just as importantly, you need to make sure that lots of other sites on the internet are linking to you. The more important and well known those sites are and the more relevant to what your site is about, the better for you.
Even more interesting, if I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens photos" (note the addition of the word "photos"), you are #2 in Google. Google has figured out that you're a photo site and the others are not. Hmmm. I think Google's doing what it's supposed to. If people are searching for information on Mount Stewart House and Gardens, those other sites have a lot more info than you do. If people are searching for photos of it, you win. I wonder if you might play better in the information search if you had lots more text information on the places - not just text spammed into corners in your galleries, but actual information pages. You could add some description pages (using gallery HTML pages) for each location that contain a bunch of useful info and then linked directly to your gallery from it. You could even embed some of the photos in the description pages using custom HTML.
You could also contact all the other sites offering information about the places you have photos of and offer them a link to your photos so their visitors could see more what the places are like. If they aren't competitors, they might think it's useful for their visitors even if you have a commercial angle.
Crap , absolute crap , my website has been destroyed by Smugmug , you fail to explain why so many of my urls are now resticted by the robots.txt , again and agian GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK , Smugmug directors , GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm very sorry that you won't listen to us We have explained, over and over again. Both here and by email to you. Please reply to my message from the help desk. Thank you.
I'm very sorry that you won't listen to us We have explained, over and over again. Both here and by email to you. Please reply to my message from the help desk. Thank you.
County Antrim photos, Belfast City, Antrim Castle, Carrickfergus harbour, Irish photographs, Northern Ireland images and photos, Landscape photos of Ireland, Dark Hedges in Armoy, Lagan basin, Antrim Coast, Antrim coastline, Portbraden, Port, Braden, Dunluce castle, Blackhead lighthouse, Islandmagee, Coastal path from Larne, Ballintioty Harbour, Belfast lough, Belfast Castle, Bushmills river, Cascade, Bushmills whisky, Carnlough Harour, Glenariff waterfall, Castlerock rainbow, Belfast City hall chambers, Waterfall Crumlin Glen, Dixon park, Giants causeway, Antrim coast, Glenariff harbour, Glenarriff waterfalls, Picnic in Glenariff park, Waterfall in forest park ,Carrick-a-Rede ropebridge, Glenoe waterfall, Kinbane castle and cliffs, Glenariff forest river, Ballintoy harbour sunset, Larne coastal route, Monkey at Belfast Zoo, Mussenden temple, SS Nomadic Titanic quarter, Belfast harbour, Parliment buildings, Stormont, Portballintrae harbour seaside, Wallpapers, Zoo, Backgrounds, Queen's University, School on the Causeway coast ,Sunset on Sheep Island, Whitepark bay, Sheep island, Rathlin Island, Belfast shipyard cranes, Stormont Castle, Whitehead, Prince Charles Way, Politician's resting place, Sunset on the Antrim coast, The new bridge at Toome, Cushendunn, Portrush beach, Barry's amusements, Glenarm castle, Port Braden, Giant's ring, Shaws bridge, Victoria shopping centre, Whitehead, Ireland views, Irish Views
Then I see "Niphotos.com" in large print overtop the middle of every photo.
I cant figure out what the heck it is that I am looking at, and while resisting the urge to hit the back button trying to get out of this hell, it takes a minute or two of looking over all this stuff to try to figure out what it is that I am looking at, then I finally see, "Photographs of County Antrim and Coastline", then it finally hits me that I am looking at a set of photos from "County Antrim", and that this isnt just a set of random images. Although I still dont have a clue where "county Antrim" is or anything about what I am looking at, and the "niphotos.com" is still distracting me from fully enjoying the photos.
Why in the world would a person want there site like this
.... you fail to explain why so many of my urls are now resticted by the robots.txt , again and agian .....
Please, take a minute and read what I am about to say very carefully. Then go back and re-read the posts on this thread from jfriend, mbrady, and racer again too, I honestly think they have gone way out of their way to try and help you.
This is the answer to your specific question (although this was covered many times in the past, I am happy to repeat it one more time):
These are the URLs - and the ONLY URLs that we block from Google:
The new one that is affecting you here is the keywords. Your keywords appear in the <meta> tags for the image - as well as on the page where the photo is displayed. We are just blocking the "/keyword" URL and for good reason. The /keywords path is an alternative way to navigate your images, but it does not help with SEO.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bot going to this page: http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/ - there are thousands on links on that page. And clicking any one of them, takes you to another page, where you can in a literally endless combination add and remove keywords.
Once a bot hits this page, it could spend weeks or even months trying to crawl all of those pages and make sense out of it. And at the end of that, even if they did get into the index (which most of them will not), those pages are not very user friendly and do not showcase your galleries and photography.
Another poster on this thread made the point with a single photo on your website. I'm going to incorporate his example here, again. Here is the page that a search engine would send you to based on a page index from the /keyword URL:
.. as you can see, it is a single photo. It does not emphasize your gallery at all. A visitor seeing this single photo may decide it does not interest them and not bother to look any further. The rate at which someone would view that and then click the back button would be close to 100%.
Here is that same photo, as indexed from your gallery:
Going to that page, even if that single photo does not interest me - I see some other photography there that I might actually want (as a personal example, I like the castle photo quite a bit). Further, if you view the HTML source of that page you will see all of your keywords in the meta tags - and the description/title tags are also there too. That is the page the search engines see and the content on the page (hopefully, if you used the right descriptions and keywords) are highly relevant to the photograph.
Fact .....Smugmug wrote the programme that highlights the keywords and the photos and the gallerys , my images are now not available on Google , neither are my pages , only 19 urls are indexed on Google according to the latest from Google , again , and again, again i ask you !!!!!¬!. REFUND MY MONEY ..................................NOW
take a minute and read what I am about to say very carefully. Then go back and re-read the posts on this thread from jfriend, mbrady, and racer again too, I honestly think they have gone way out of their way to try and help you.
This is the answer to your specific question (although this was covered many times in the past, I am happy to repeat it one more time):
These are the URLs - and the ONLY URLs that we block from Google:
The new one that is affecting you here is the keywords. Your keywords appear in the <meta> tags for the image - as well as on the page where the photo is displayed. We are just blocking the "/keyword" URL and for good reason. The /keywords path is an alternative way to navigate your images, but it does not help with SEO.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bot going to this page: http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/ - there are thousands on links on that page. And clicking any one of them, takes you to another page, where you can in a literally endless combination add and remove keywords.
Once a bot hits this page, it could spend weeks or even months trying to crawl all of those pages and make sense out of it. And at the end of that, even if they did get into the index (which most of them will not), those pages are not very user friendly and do not showcase your galleries and photography.
Another poster on this thread made the point with a single photo on your website. I'm going to incorporate his example here, again. Here is the page that a search engine would send you to based on a page index from the /keyword URL:
.. as you can see, it is a single photo. It does not emphasize your gallery at all. A visitor seeing this single photo may decide it does not interest them and not bother to look any further. The rate at which someone would view that and then click the back button would be close to 100%.
Here is that same photo, as indexed from your gallery:
Going to that page, even if that single photo does not interest me - I see some other photography there that I might actually want (as a personal example, I like the castle photo quite a bit). Further, if you view the HTML source of that page you will see all of your keywords in the meta tags - and the description/title tags are also there too. That is the page the search engines see and the content on the page (hopefully, if you used the right descriptions and keywords) are highly relevant to the photograph.
REFUND MY MONEY ..................................NOW
It is not my job to deal with refunds, my assumption is that comment was meant for Andy, that you have read his comments and are abiding his requests to respond to the help-desk ticket so he can assist you further.
My job in this situation is to correct the record and lay out the facts, hopefully in a way that is understandable. Especially because this is a public forum, it is important to have the facts right.
Fact .....Smugmug wrote the programme that highlights the keywords and the photos and the gallerys
What do you mean by "highlights the keywords and the photos and the gallerys"? Do you mean with respect to how crawlers get to the content, our SEO strategies, etc? If so, then yes we do handle that. And you should understand that the relationship between SmugMug and our photographers is symbiotic - not adversarial. We gain nothing - and in fact lose EVERYTHING by not doing all that we can to drive traffic to the galleries.
Why on earth would you think we gain anything by messing up your gallery or screwing up your SEO? Can you just take a step back and think about this for a minute? I'm not saying we always get everything right (nobody is perfect) - but we ALWAYS try to put our best foot forward.
Do you have any idea how much time and energy we put into monitoring and working on SEO related issues? It is really amazing to me that you hold our efforts in such low esteem.
my images are now not available on Google , neither are my pages , only 19 urls are indexed on Google according to the latest from Google , again , and again, again i ask you !!!!!¬!.
Yes, I expect that number to drop once the /keyword URLs filter out. This is not a numbers game and I am genuinely sad to see that after all the information that has been passed to you - you still think it is. There was a time in the past where people felt that by spamming tons of URLs into the search engines was a good thing. The search engines have progressed far beyond that and we need to keep up with the times.
If you click the above URL and are seeing 19 images, please attach a screenshot of it. I'm not interested in debating Webmaster Tools with you at this point, those statistics are almost always out-of-date. It is better to go directly to the source (as in Google search) rather then a tool which lags greatly and does not report accurate statistics.
Yes, we are blocking /keywords (the URLs). We've discussed and debated it at length and are confident this is the right thing to do right now. What doors we may open later is still open to further discussion and debate. I wish you could have been a productive member of both of them. On a positive note, all of your comments have made me want to check things over and over and over again to make sure we are not blocking pages unintentionally. After seeing how much more rapidly new pages are getting crawled (instead of wasting time on the ineffective URLs), I am now more convinced then ever that we are on the right path here.
Barring some calmly written response from you or correcting misstatements of facts, this is going to be my last post on this thread.
The new one that is affecting you here is the keywords. Your keywords appear in the <meta> tags for the image - as well as on the page where the photo is displayed. We are just blocking the "/keyword" URL and for good reason. The /keywords path is an alternative way to navigate your images, but it does not help with SEO.
I always figured the keywords page was great for helping google find content on my site. That page is now blocked from google? Seems like a mistake to me. I get your point and I guess you've done the research, but I tend to like google finding my keyword pages including the main index. All the images in a keywords gallery are on topic. What could be better for someone searching google?
Also, you might want to start blocking /newexif.mg from google. A lot of my indexed pages are just exif information.
The last thing that comes up often on google is that it has indexed a lot of my pages in single-image style. I don't want people entering my site that way. Has that been fixed?
I always figured the keywords page was great for helping google find content on my site. That page is now blocked from google? Seems like a mistake to me.
Dave
And it gets worse !!!
Now Google has rejected my sitemap http://www.niphotos.com/sitemap-base-xml.gz can it get any more confused and worse ?????worse.jpg
This really is rediculous..............................
No Andy ................give me my money back .................... you know my personal mail address ........contact me via that ..............
I have. Numerous times. If you won't reply we cannot help you. At this point, I have said the same thing over and over again I'm really sorry that you won't listen, and you won't reply to my emails from the help desk.
The rejected URLs are links to stuff you don't want indexed
Many of my rejected pages are keyword and date galleries. I DO want them to be crawled. I get traffic going directly to those pages and you block them?
Many of my rejected pages are keyword and date galleries. I DO want them to be crawled. I get traffic going directly to those pages and you block them?
Hi Erick, in this case you're going to have to let us make the call - yes, we're directing traffic to the most important pages on your site. SmugMug SEO remains (and gains) amazingly high.
Sorry Andy but given SM's history with SEO, I just can't take your word for granted. How do you know which pages are important for me? Keyword and /popular pages ARE important. In many cases, I'd rather have traffic directed to them instead of the gallery where a particular photo might be.
Sorry Andy but given SM's history with SEO, I just can't take your word for granted. How do you know which pages are important for me? Keyword and /popular pages ARE important. In many cases, I'd rather have traffic directed to them instead of the gallery where a particular photo might be.
Erick,
Why do you want traffic going to the /keywords URLs? Please give Andy and I something good here, if you want us to advocate for it - and something that is not "you should not be blocking /keywords", because that is just plain wrong. As I said in a previous post, we are very open to hearing about where this goes next. I'm trying to understand more about why you want them going to the keywords page, because I think the reasons you want them to go there may be masking something broader. So please think about this carefully and walk me through your reasoning.
Can you point me in the direction of any data points that you have suggesting that any significant amount of traffic is being directed to those URLs from Google? I am just not seeing it.
Keywords are important, that is why they appear in the meta tags and on each page where the photography fits.
Now Google has rejected my sitemap http://www.niphotos.com/sitemap-base-xml.gz can it get any more confused and worse ????
This really is rediculous..............................
When you click that link, it should tell you what the problem is. Can you do that and then paste the exact error message here (I don't need a screenshot, just the text of the message) along with the data of the error.
.. And I'm going to ask you one more time to use calmer language in your posts. I do not often get frustrated, but if you want me to spend my personal weekend helping you, you'll need to tone it down.
Why do you want traffic going to the /keywords URLs? Please give Andy and I something good here, if you want us to advocate for it - and something that is not "you should not be blocking /keywords", because that is just plain wrong.
"You should not be blocking /keywords" is a perfectly valid answer. Why is it "just plain wrong"? Photos in a gallery aren't always related, so keyword pages are another way of finding a group of related photos.
Can you point me in the direction of any data points that you have suggesting that any significant amount of traffic is being directed to those URLs from Google? I am just not seeing it.
What is significant? I get traffic to /keyword, /popular and /date. That's good enough for me. I haven't been using keyword seriously for very long and just began linking to them instead of galleries because they're much more convenient than the notsonicenames, but now SM just put a spoke in my wheels.
"You should not be blocking /keywords" is a perfectly valid answer. Why is it "just plain wrong"? Photos in a gallery aren't always related, so keyword pages are another way of finding a group of related photos.
Because we can drive traffic to that specific photo much easier, it gets indexed according the relevant content on the page rather then some artificial inflation based on the keywords - which search engines will see as spam and actually downgrade the relevance of those keywords.
What is significant? I get traffic to /keyword, /popular and /date. That's good enough for me. I haven't been using keyword seriously for very long and just began linking to them instead of galleries because they're much more convenient than the notsonicenames, but now SM just put a spoke in my wheels.
I would consider a page that gets less traffic then the loss of traffic its existence creates for another URL that contains the same content to be insignificant. Everything else is significant.
We did not take away the /keywords, /popular, or /date URLs. We just prevent bots from crawling them. Linking to them works just fine. Maybe this hints at what I was getting at earlier - you want to link to a keywords page instead of the actual photo because of how limiting the "notsonicenames" are? Can you give me an example of what you link to and what kind of thing you would like to link to, if that is the case?
Would you rather have 10,000 clicks to your photo page, or would you rather have 5,000 clicks to your photo page and 100 clicks to the /keywords, /popular, and /date URLs? Because those are the kinds of metrics we are talking about here. And on top of that, it takes a magnitude (weeks instead of days, months instead of weeks) to index new content because of the nearly endless trails that bots end up going down just for daring to start down the /keyword path. I think there may be some paths to open up here at some point. We need good discussion on this, so I'm hoping our dialog continues.
Thank you for your time I really do appreciate it.
Because we can drive traffic to that specific photo much easier, it gets indexed according the relevant content on the page rather then some artificial inflation based on the keywords - which search engines will see as spam and actually downgrade the relevance of those keywords.
I would consider a page that gets less traffic then the loss of traffic its existence creates for another URL that contains the same content to be insignificant. Everything else is significant.
We did not take away the /keywords, /popular, or /date URLs. We just prevent bots from crawling them. Linking to them works just fine. Maybe this hints at what I was getting at earlier - you want to link to a keywords page instead of the actual photo because of how limiting the "notsonicenames" are? Can you give me an example of what you link to and what kind of thing you would like to link to, if that is the case?
Would you rather have 10,000 clicks to your photo page, or would you rather have 5,000 clicks to your photo page and 100 clicks to the /keywords, /popular, and /date URLs? Because those are the kinds of metrics we are talking about here. And on top of that, it takes a magnitude (weeks instead of days, months instead of weeks) to index new content because of the nearly endless trails that bots end up going down just for daring to start down the /keyword path. I think there may be some paths to open up here at some point. We need good discussion on this, so I'm hoping our dialog continues.
Thank you for your time I really do appreciate it.
Two results on page 1 go to my site... /keyword/n6193b/...
No results go to a non-keyword page. If someone happens to be searching for "n6193b" (a plane's registration number), I'd rather them land right at /keyword/n6193b then in the middle of some gallery on my site. It makes the most sense that they would end up where they can find pictures of the thing they're looking for right?
Google won't see my keyword index now, right? When someone searches for 5 unique words that are all on my keyword page, I'd like them to be directed to my site. There may be no other page on the site where all 5 of those words appear together.
Is there a reason why removing /keyword/ and /popular/ pages from google will actually help get google to find those other pages with the same images? It seem that in the past, based on my site's search results, google has been much more successful with keyword and popular pages. I'm not sure why that is, but I wouldn't like to see them removed from the results unless you have really good reason to believe that this will somehow cause google to index the pages you think it should.
Two results on page 1 go to my site... /keyword/n6193b/...
No results go to a non-keyword page. If someone happens to be searching for "n6193b" (a plane's registration number), I'd rather them land right at /keyword/n6193b then in the middle of some gallery on my site. It makes the most sense that they would end up where they can find pictures of the thing they're looking for right?
Google won't see my keyword index now, right? When someone searches for 5 unique words that are all on my keyword page, I'd like them to be directed to my site. There may be no other page on the site where all 5 of those words appear together.
Is there a reason why removing /keyword/ and /popular/ pages from google will actually help get google to find those other pages with the same images? It seem that in the past, based on my site's search results, google has been much more successful with keyword and popular pages. I'm not sure why that is, but I wouldn't like to see them removed from the results unless you have really good reason to believe that this will somehow cause google to index the pages you think it should.
Dave
Hi Dave,
I see what you are saying, but let me add something to your Google query to illustrate something.
If I add "site:skydivingstills.com" to the tail number, I end up with this:
As you can see, it does index that keyword on the main gallery page. The reason for that is that if you look at the page source the tail number is part of the keywords in the meta tag - and it also appears on the actual page content. The problem is the rank for that page has dropped because of all the other pages that pulling relevance away from it.
I imagine that there are maybe more photos of that plane, but for purposes of explanation, lets assume there is just 1. What we have done here is broken up all of the page rank for that single photograph among 242 pages - instead of directing all of it to that one highly relevant page.
You will see that top 1 and 2 position are given to airport-data.com. Although there are probably other reasons for this too, one of the big ones is that if we add site:airport-data.com to the search query (http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=n6193b+site:airport-data.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=d25fffd218509399) there are only 24 links on their domain name. That is 1/10th the number of pages you have for what I can tell seem to be about the same number of unique images for that tail number on each of the sites.
The situation you describe where someone enters 5 keywords may be correct - though I would need to see a specific example of that. And it is definitely something we can look at exploring solutions to down the road - but I do not think that the best way to accomplish that is the chaotic never-ending mashup of keyword URLs that are presently being done. And if someone is doing a search for 5 keywords, that is a pretty lengthy set of words and I bet some of them would be found across all of your pages (for example "photography" or "skydiving").
If I check your site vs airport-data, they have a PR4 and you have a PR2. It is actually quite something that you have the rank you are getting giving that gap, so great job with keeping your keywords so relevant.
One of the things you could argue (and playing devil's advocate, I will) is that the actual page with the photography is the one pulling traffic away from the keywords page. In this case where a specific tail number is involved - that could be true. You have been very helpful with this specific example and you have given me something interesting to discuss with the others - I will make a point to do that next week.
Because we can drive traffic to that specific photo much easier, it gets indexed according the relevant content on the page rather then some artificial inflation based on the keywords - which search engines will see as spam and actually downgrade the relevance of those keywords.
I would consider a page that gets less traffic then the loss of traffic its existence creates for another URL that contains the same content to be insignificant. Everything else is significant.
I don't think Google sees those pages as spam, and the content isn't the same. The main picture may be the same but the overall page content isn't.
We did not take away the /keywords, /popular, or /date URLs. We just prevent bots from crawling them. Linking to them works just fine. Maybe this hints at what I was getting at earlier - you want to link to a keywords page instead of the actual photo because of how limiting the "notsonicenames" are? Can you give me an example of what you link to and what kind of thing you would like to link to, if that is the case?
I link to keyword pages so Google will find them more easily. When I checked what indexed pages, keyword pages always came first and I wanted to bank on it so I began linking to them to give them more importance. For exemple, instead of linking to a fox picture in a mammal gallery, I link to that same picture via /keyword/foxes. Hopefully and eventually, I'd prefer people finding my site when searching for "foxes" to land on the on the foxes keyword page and see the other fox pictures instead of the mammal gallery where they might not see the other photos.
Would you rather have 10,000 clicks to your photo page, or would you rather have 5,000 clicks to your photo page and 100 clicks to the /keywords, /popular, and /date URLs? Because those are the kinds of metrics we are talking about here.
Where do you get these figures from? Why would I get fewer clicks because an image is found on two pages?
And on top of that, it takes a magnitude (weeks instead of days, months instead of weeks) to index new content because of the nearly endless trails that bots end up going down just for daring to start down the /keyword path.
My images are already indexed very quickly. Reading the forum, it seems I'm the only one who gets his images indexed at all (over 3800 today, three time the amount of listed images on my site). Someone found an image uploaded just 5-6 weeks ago and there's no way they could miss it (the third is on the keyword gallery). I was doing fine before SM introduced nicenames (I still don't like nicenames for photos) and a bunch of other SEO stuff. In fact, my traffic took a dive then (all these new urls) and never fully recovered. So you see why I'm weary of SM when you guys decide to temper with SEO.
I really challenge you to show how any similar company is doing better. We're putting amazing amounts of $, resource, energy and time into this always - and have for a long long time. SEO on SmugMug is at an all-time high and getting better.
Comments
When I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens" on Google, you show up on page 3 for me. What you need more than anything is other good sites linking to you. Google knows what's on your pages. What moves you up in the rankings is how precisely you match the user's search and how important it thinks your pages are relative to the other things that match. That has nothing to do with how many total pages from your site it has indexed and has everything to do with what the exact content of those pages is and how much of the rest of the web knows about your pages. When I look at the links on page 1 of the Google results, they are all pages dedicated to Mount Stewart House and Gardens with lots of text describing them. #1 is the Wikipedia page. #2 is the National Trust page. These are pages that have significant relevant content and probably have lots of other sites linking to them. When you look at the hits on page 1, do you legitimately think you should rank ahead of them? I know you want to, but do you really think you should?
FYI, a search for "site:niphotos.com" on Google returns 11,500 results, many of which include things restricted in the robots file so Google may not be fully up-to-date on your site yet after recent changes.
Mostly, I think you need to realize that Google ranking is not a contest to see how many pages you can put in its index. You want to make sure that Google knows about all your content and that no page of original content is missed, but for what I see of your site that's approx 25 pages. Then, you need to make sure all the right stuff is in those pages. And, lastly and just as importantly, you need to make sure that lots of other sites on the internet are linking to you. The more important and well known those sites are and the more relevant to what your site is about, the better for you.
Even more interesting, if I search for "Mount stewart house and gardens photos" (note the addition of the word "photos"), you are #2 in Google. Google has figured out that you're a photo site and the others are not. Hmmm. I think Google's doing what it's supposed to. If people are searching for information on Mount Stewart House and Gardens, those other sites have a lot more info than you do. If people are searching for photos of it, you win. I wonder if you might play better in the information search if you had lots more text information on the places - not just text spammed into corners in your galleries, but actual information pages. You could add some description pages (using gallery HTML pages) for each location that contain a bunch of useful info and then linked directly to your gallery from it. You could even embed some of the photos in the description pages using custom HTML.
You could also contact all the other sites offering information about the places you have photos of and offer them a link to your photos so their visitors could see more what the places are like. If they aren't competitors, they might think it's useful for their visitors even if you have a commercial angle.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
... I just wanted to say: thank you...
- Greg
I'm very sorry that you won't listen to us
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
http://www.niphotos.com/County-Antrim-photographs-and/Photographs-of-County-Antrim/13079201_iZM6x#954646627_NtQ5z
The first thing that pops out at me is this, What comes to mind is "spam", then I see this,
Then this,
Then I see "Niphotos.com" in large print overtop the middle of every photo.
I cant figure out what the heck it is that I am looking at, and while resisting the urge to hit the back button trying to get out of this hell, it takes a minute or two of looking over all this stuff to try to figure out what it is that I am looking at, then I finally see, "Photographs of County Antrim and Coastline", then it finally hits me that I am looking at a set of photos from "County Antrim", and that this isnt just a set of random images. Although I still dont have a clue where "county Antrim" is or anything about what I am looking at, and the "niphotos.com" is still distracting me from fully enjoying the photos.
Why in the world would a person want there site like this
I did. 10 minutes ago from the help desk. If you wish to carry this on, please, we'll do so from the help desk, thanks.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Please, take a minute and read what I am about to say very carefully. Then go back and re-read the posts on this thread from jfriend, mbrady, and racer again too, I honestly think they have gone way out of their way to try and help you.
This is the answer to your specific question (although this was covered many times in the past, I am happy to repeat it one more time):
These are the URLs - and the ONLY URLs that we block from Google:
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /hack/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /keyword/
Disallow: /popular/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /VIP/
Disallow: /vip/
The new one that is affecting you here is the keywords. Your keywords appear in the <meta> tags for the image - as well as on the page where the photo is displayed. We are just blocking the "/keyword" URL and for good reason. The /keywords path is an alternative way to navigate your images, but it does not help with SEO.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bot going to this page: http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/ - there are thousands on links on that page. And clicking any one of them, takes you to another page, where you can in a literally endless combination add and remove keywords.
Once a bot hits this page, it could spend weeks or even months trying to crawl all of those pages and make sense out of it. And at the end of that, even if they did get into the index (which most of them will not), those pages are not very user friendly and do not showcase your galleries and photography.
Another poster on this thread made the point with a single photo on your website. I'm going to incorporate his example here, again. Here is the page that a search engine would send you to based on a page index from the /keyword URL:
http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large
.. as you can see, it is a single photo. It does not emphasize your gallery at all. A visitor seeing this single photo may decide it does not interest them and not bother to look any further. The rate at which someone would view that and then click the back button would be close to 100%.
Here is that same photo, as indexed from your gallery:
http://www.niphotos.com/County-Antrim-photographs-and/Photographs-of-County-Antrim/13079201_iZM6x#954652749_Rsdst
Going to that page, even if that single photo does not interest me - I see some other photography there that I might actually want (as a personal example, I like the castle photo quite a bit). Further, if you view the HTML source of that page you will see all of your keywords in the meta tags - and the description/title tags are also there too. That is the page the search engines see and the content on the page (hopefully, if you used the right descriptions and keywords) are highly relevant to the photograph.
- Greg
take a minute and read what I am about to say very carefully. Then go back and re-read the posts on this thread from jfriend, mbrady, and racer again too, I honestly think they have gone way out of their way to try and help you.
This is the answer to your specific question (although this was covered many times in the past, I am happy to repeat it one more time):
These are the URLs - and the ONLY URLs that we block from Google:
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /hack/
Disallow: /help/
Disallow: /keyword/
Disallow: /popular/
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /test/
Disallow: /VIP/
Disallow: /vip/
The new one that is affecting you here is the keywords. Your keywords appear in the <meta> tags for the image - as well as on the page where the photo is displayed. We are just blocking the "/keyword" URL and for good reason. The /keywords path is an alternative way to navigate your images, but it does not help with SEO.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bot going to this page: http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/ - there are thousands on links on that page. And clicking any one of them, takes you to another page, where you can in a literally endless combination add and remove keywords.
Once a bot hits this page, it could spend weeks or even months trying to crawl all of those pages and make sense out of it. And at the end of that, even if they did get into the index (which most of them will not), those pages are not very user friendly and do not showcase your galleries and photography.
Another poster on this thread made the point with a single photo on your website. I'm going to incorporate his example here, again. Here is the page that a search engine would send you to based on a page index from the /keyword URL:
http://www.niphotos.com/keyword/belfast/2/954652749_Rsdst/Large
.. as you can see, it is a single photo. It does not emphasize your gallery at all. A visitor seeing this single photo may decide it does not interest them and not bother to look any further. The rate at which someone would view that and then click the back button would be close to 100%.
Here is that same photo, as indexed from your gallery:
http://www.niphotos.com/County-Antrim-photographs-and/Photographs-of-County-Antrim/13079201_iZM6x#954652749_Rsdst
Going to that page, even if that single photo does not interest me - I see some other photography there that I might actually want (as a personal example, I like the castle photo quite a bit). Further, if you view the HTML source of that page you will see all of your keywords in the meta tags - and the description/title tags are also there too. That is the page the search engines see and the content on the page (hopefully, if you used the right descriptions and keywords) are highly relevant to the photograph.
- Greg[/QUOTE]
Proof of the SEO failure
http://lichtenhansen-english.blogspot.com/2009/08/page-titles-smugmug-versus-google-seo.html
I cannot help you until you reply to my email. It's not something we can do via Dgrin. Please do reply to my email, thank you. It's ticket #227913.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
That blog post 1.5 years old and we've done a vast number of improvements to the site since then. I'm sorry you won't listen to us
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
One post of this is enough. I've deleted your duplicate post that you placed in another thread.
Please do reply to my email from the help desk, thank you.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
It is not my job to deal with refunds, my assumption is that comment was meant for Andy, that you have read his comments and are abiding his requests to respond to the help-desk ticket so he can assist you further.
My job in this situation is to correct the record and lay out the facts, hopefully in a way that is understandable. Especially because this is a public forum, it is important to have the facts right.
What do you mean by "highlights the keywords and the photos and the gallerys"? Do you mean with respect to how crawlers get to the content, our SEO strategies, etc? If so, then yes we do handle that. And you should understand that the relationship between SmugMug and our photographers is symbiotic - not adversarial. We gain nothing - and in fact lose EVERYTHING by not doing all that we can to drive traffic to the galleries.
Why on earth would you think we gain anything by messing up your gallery or screwing up your SEO? Can you just take a step back and think about this for a minute? I'm not saying we always get everything right (nobody is perfect) - but we ALWAYS try to put our best foot forward.
Do you have any idea how much time and energy we put into monitoring and working on SEO related issues? It is really amazing to me that you hold our efforts in such low esteem.
You say there are 19 URLs indexed in Google. That is simply not a fact. There are, in fact, 11,500. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=site:niphotos.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Yes, I expect that number to drop once the /keyword URLs filter out. This is not a numbers game and I am genuinely sad to see that after all the information that has been passed to you - you still think it is. There was a time in the past where people felt that by spamming tons of URLs into the search engines was a good thing. The search engines have progressed far beyond that and we need to keep up with the times.
If you click the above URL and are seeing 19 images, please attach a screenshot of it. I'm not interested in debating Webmaster Tools with you at this point, those statistics are almost always out-of-date. It is better to go directly to the source (as in Google search) rather then a tool which lags greatly and does not report accurate statistics.
Yes, we are blocking /keywords (the URLs). We've discussed and debated it at length and are confident this is the right thing to do right now. What doors we may open later is still open to further discussion and debate. I wish you could have been a productive member of both of them. On a positive note, all of your comments have made me want to check things over and over and over again to make sure we are not blocking pages unintentionally. After seeing how much more rapidly new pages are getting crawled (instead of wasting time on the ineffective URLs), I am now more convinced then ever that we are on the right path here.
Barring some calmly written response from you or correcting misstatements of facts, this is going to be my last post on this thread.
- Greg
I always figured the keywords page was great for helping google find content on my site. That page is now blocked from google? Seems like a mistake to me. I get your point and I guess you've done the research, but I tend to like google finding my keyword pages including the main index. All the images in a keywords gallery are on topic. What could be better for someone searching google?
Also, you might want to start blocking /newexif.mg from google. A lot of my indexed pages are just exif information.
The last thing that comes up often on google is that it has indexed a lot of my pages in single-image style. I don't want people entering my site that way. Has that been fixed?
Dave
It's not a mistake, promise!
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Now Google has rejected my sitemap http://www.niphotos.com/sitemap-base-xml.gz can it get any more confused and worse ?????worse.jpg
This really is rediculous..............................
I have. Numerous times. If you won't reply we cannot help you. At this point, I have said the same thing over and over again
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Many of my rejected pages are keyword and date galleries. I DO want them to be crawled. I get traffic going directly to those pages and you block them?
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Hi Erick, in this case you're going to have to let us make the call - yes, we're directing traffic to the most important pages on your site. SmugMug SEO remains (and gains) amazingly high.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Erick,
Why do you want traffic going to the /keywords URLs? Please give Andy and I something good here, if you want us to advocate for it - and something that is not "you should not be blocking /keywords", because that is just plain wrong. As I said in a previous post, we are very open to hearing about where this goes next. I'm trying to understand more about why you want them going to the keywords page, because I think the reasons you want them to go there may be masking something broader. So please think about this carefully and walk me through your reasoning.
Can you point me in the direction of any data points that you have suggesting that any significant amount of traffic is being directed to those URLs from Google? I am just not seeing it.
Keywords are important, that is why they appear in the meta tags and on each page where the photography fits.
- Greg
When you click that link, it should tell you what the problem is. Can you do that and then paste the exact error message here (I don't need a screenshot, just the text of the message) along with the data of the error.
.. And I'm going to ask you one more time to use calmer language in your posts. I do not often get frustrated, but if you want me to spend my personal weekend helping you, you'll need to tone it down.
- Greg
"You should not be blocking /keywords" is a perfectly valid answer. Why is it "just plain wrong"? Photos in a gallery aren't always related, so keyword pages are another way of finding a group of related photos.
What is significant? I get traffic to /keyword, /popular and /date. That's good enough for me. I haven't been using keyword seriously for very long and just began linking to them instead of galleries because they're much more convenient than the notsonicenames, but now SM just put a spoke in my wheels.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
Because we can drive traffic to that specific photo much easier, it gets indexed according the relevant content on the page rather then some artificial inflation based on the keywords - which search engines will see as spam and actually downgrade the relevance of those keywords.
I would consider a page that gets less traffic then the loss of traffic its existence creates for another URL that contains the same content to be insignificant. Everything else is significant.
We did not take away the /keywords, /popular, or /date URLs. We just prevent bots from crawling them. Linking to them works just fine. Maybe this hints at what I was getting at earlier - you want to link to a keywords page instead of the actual photo because of how limiting the "notsonicenames" are? Can you give me an example of what you link to and what kind of thing you would like to link to, if that is the case?
Would you rather have 10,000 clicks to your photo page, or would you rather have 5,000 clicks to your photo page and 100 clicks to the /keywords, /popular, and /date URLs? Because those are the kinds of metrics we are talking about here. And on top of that, it takes a magnitude (weeks instead of days, months instead of weeks) to index new content because of the nearly endless trails that bots end up going down just for daring to start down the /keyword path. I think there may be some paths to open up here at some point. We need good discussion on this, so I'm hoping our dialog continues.
Thank you for your time I really do appreciate it.
- Greg
I'll give you an example.
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&q=n6193b
Two results on page 1 go to my site... /keyword/n6193b/...
No results go to a non-keyword page. If someone happens to be searching for "n6193b" (a plane's registration number), I'd rather them land right at /keyword/n6193b then in the middle of some gallery on my site. It makes the most sense that they would end up where they can find pictures of the thing they're looking for right?
Google won't see my keyword index now, right? When someone searches for 5 unique words that are all on my keyword page, I'd like them to be directed to my site. There may be no other page on the site where all 5 of those words appear together.
Is there a reason why removing /keyword/ and /popular/ pages from google will actually help get google to find those other pages with the same images? It seem that in the past, based on my site's search results, google has been much more successful with keyword and popular pages. I'm not sure why that is, but I wouldn't like to see them removed from the results unless you have really good reason to believe that this will somehow cause google to index the pages you think it should.
Dave
Hi Dave,
I see what you are saying, but let me add something to your Google query to illustrate something.
If I add "site:skydivingstills.com" to the tail number, I end up with this:
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=n6193b+site:skydivingstills.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=f&oq=&pbx=1&fp=d25fffd218509399
You will notice there are 242 results. One of them is a direct link to the photograph: http://www.skydivingstills.com/Skydiving/2011/Weekend-Pics-13011/15652238_9utqM
As you can see, it does index that keyword on the main gallery page. The reason for that is that if you look at the page source the tail number is part of the keywords in the meta tag - and it also appears on the actual page content. The problem is the rank for that page has dropped because of all the other pages that pulling relevance away from it.
I imagine that there are maybe more photos of that plane, but for purposes of explanation, lets assume there is just 1. What we have done here is broken up all of the page rank for that single photograph among 242 pages - instead of directing all of it to that one highly relevant page.
Going back to your original query at this URL: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&q=n6193b&fp=d25fffd218509399
You will see that top 1 and 2 position are given to airport-data.com. Although there are probably other reasons for this too, one of the big ones is that if we add site:airport-data.com to the search query (http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&q=n6193b+site:airport-data.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=d25fffd218509399) there are only 24 links on their domain name. That is 1/10th the number of pages you have for what I can tell seem to be about the same number of unique images for that tail number on each of the sites.
The situation you describe where someone enters 5 keywords may be correct - though I would need to see a specific example of that. And it is definitely something we can look at exploring solutions to down the road - but I do not think that the best way to accomplish that is the chaotic never-ending mashup of keyword URLs that are presently being done. And if someone is doing a search for 5 keywords, that is a pretty lengthy set of words and I bet some of them would be found across all of your pages (for example "photography" or "skydiving").
One last thing that is affecting you is the page rank of your site. You can check that here:http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
If I check your site vs airport-data, they have a PR4 and you have a PR2. It is actually quite something that you have the rank you are getting giving that gap, so great job with keeping your keywords so relevant.
One of the things you could argue (and playing devil's advocate, I will) is that the actual page with the photography is the one pulling traffic away from the keywords page. In this case where a specific tail number is involved - that could be true. You have been very helpful with this specific example and you have given me something interesting to discuss with the others - I will make a point to do that next week.
- Greg
I don't think Google sees those pages as spam, and the content isn't the same. The main picture may be the same but the overall page content isn't.
I link to keyword pages so Google will find them more easily. When I checked what indexed pages, keyword pages always came first and I wanted to bank on it so I began linking to them to give them more importance. For exemple, instead of linking to a fox picture in a mammal gallery, I link to that same picture via /keyword/foxes. Hopefully and eventually, I'd prefer people finding my site when searching for "foxes" to land on the on the foxes keyword page and see the other fox pictures instead of the mammal gallery where they might not see the other photos.
Where do you get these figures from? Why would I get fewer clicks because an image is found on two pages?
My images are already indexed very quickly. Reading the forum, it seems I'm the only one who gets his images indexed at all (over 3800 today, three time the amount of listed images on my site). Someone found an image uploaded just 5-6 weeks ago and there's no way they could miss it (the third is on the keyword gallery). I was doing fine before SM introduced nicenames (I still don't like nicenames for photos) and a bunch of other SEO stuff. In fact, my traffic took a dive then (all these new urls) and never fully recovered. So you see why I'm weary of SM when you guys decide to temper with SEO.
borealphoto.smugmug.com
I really challenge you to show how any similar company is doing better. We're putting amazing amounts of $, resource, energy and time into this always - and have for a long long time. SEO on SmugMug is at an all-time high and getting better.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter