Sub domains and SEO

George Maciver · August 5, 2013

Hello

I have my own domain (highlandsofscotlandphotography.com) which I've been using with Smugmug for quite some time, well over a year. I'm happy with Smugmug, and I love the new Smugmug.

However, a couple of days back, after lengthy discussion and checking search engines, I've come to realise that domains pointed to Smugmug (sub domains) are not crawled by search engines. My website title - Highlands of Scotland Photography - comes up in a search, but nothing else. None of my photos appear on any search engines. This I did not know.

So, today, I reset all my DNS Zone stuff so that my Smugmug url is now the one I was given when I first registered. I've set Highlands of Scotland Photography to simply redirect to georgemaciver.smugmug.com

Now here's the question. Will the search engines now find my photos? After all, there isn't much point in having photos on the internet if the search engines will not find them.

I do blog and post about photography at my IP Board, and the search engines find all my posts there no problem, and I link from there to Smugmug, but I don't feel that's enough.

Would some knowledgeable person please put me right here.

Enjoy your day

:wave

mbrady · August 5, 2013

I have a custom domain and get crawled by search engines, including searches that point to individual photos, not just my site as a whole. It can take awhile for Google to index things, especially Google Image Search. But as long as you've got keywords and descriptions for your photos, they should turn up eventually. Outside links to your site help quite a lot as well.

Ferguson · August 5, 2013

I've got a personal domain also, and this has been a continual problem, and is continually debated here if you look. Mine make little sense, sometimes I get found quickly, sometime with very specific search terms on old galleries Google finds nothing -- not just not highly ranked, just nothing. Images themselves (as opposed to web searches) seem to almost never show up.

The general path that follows is you complain, Smugmug tells you it is your fault, points you to some generic information on how to optimize (which admittedly most people probably do not follow thorought, maybe not even me), people who keep complaining then get pointed to a few counter-examples of "see, mine works" and it starts all over again.

I do know from doing corporate web sites that it's significantly Smugmug's fault. I don't know why, but I can take a corporate web site that's almost never hit by users, and is not linked to by anyone, put something on it, and have it show up quickly, often less than a day. Put something on Smugmug and it mostly never shows up.

Here's an example, try this in Google:

hurricanes site:www.captivephotons.com

Now back on 7/28/13 I posted a gallery of shots from a soccer team called the Cape Coral Hurricanes. The name on the gallery has "Hurricanes" in it, the gallery keywords has it, most of the images have it in their caption (the keyword on each image is just Soccer).

If I had posted that gallery on a almost unknown corporate site not on Smugmug, it wouldn't make it high in the rankings, but I guarentee it could find it.

Yet here -- nothing.

So is it me, or is it Smugmug. I know what I think, but I have no idea of why.

I hope you get more of an answer. Fortunately I'm not trying to run a business off of this and depending on Google, so I never fight for it. But it is both surprising and disappointing.

George Maciver · August 6, 2013

Hi Ferguson, I have 5 websites and an IP Board, and have no problems getting stuff ranked highly on google. 2 of my websites come up on the first page, 2 come up on the second, and the 5th (in the hugely competitive and massive Tomb Raider genre) still manages to hit the 10th page and generate me loads of traffic (over 5000 unique visitors a month). As in your case, nothing comes up from my smugmug site. I love Smugmug - I love their customer service, I love the new Smugmug, and I love their order fulfilment service, but at the end of the day, if photos don't show up in searches, there isn't much point in having them on the internet. I have decisions to make...

Ferguson · August 7, 2013

You know, I tried an experiment. In the last week I've been making a large number of changes to my Smugmug site, have uploaded at least one new gallery, changed text and headings in many of them, rearranged, etc.

In the same week, because I was annoyed, I opened a trial Zenfolio account and loaded my site there. I wasn't delighted with it, and it just sat.

In the same week, I posted one (single) image to another site, birdphotographers.net.

The Zenfolio site has zero (none, nada) links to any other site, anywhere. I didn't point people to it, or have it in back links anywhere.

So I did a search for site:www.captivephotons.com and site:captivephotons.smugmug.com on google in the last week -- TWO hits, one of them a bogus 404 page, and one my About page.

Zenfolio (with no help by links, etc) managed to find 5 pages. To me I'm amazed it could find any at all, with no back links.

And the bird photography link showed right up, quickly, under my name as well as text in the posting.

Smugmug just doesn't work and play well with Google. It isn't that it doesn't work at all, it just doesn't work correctly.

I wonder at times if I shouldn't just build my own site somewhere, but it's a LOT Of work.

By the way, I found the look and feel of Zenfolio pretty darn dated. Much more consistent UI for management and seemed solid, but the look and feel didn't tempt me. But it has gotten me looking around more now.

Sub domains and SEO

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