Question about Right Click Protection/Google Image Search

jasonscottphoto · August 9, 2013

In the past, we were told that we had to have right click protection off to have our images indexed by Google Image Search. Is this still the case?

ablichter · August 9, 2013

jasonscottphoto wrote: »

In the past, we were told that we had to have right click protection off to have our images indexed by Google Image Search. Is this still the case?

Is this so? I never read about this before. But if so, no wonder my images never ever showed up in google image search.
And how does this go along with enabling the Web Searchable "feature" on gallery level??
Have been here before in 2009 and left because all the tips and hints about SEO seems not really to work. Except for the company called SM. ;-/

jasonscottphoto · August 9, 2013

Hmm, I guess not. For a while they were saying it did. But now I am re-reading an old thread and a correction was made...

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1833964&postcount=281

ablichter · August 9, 2013

jasonscottphoto wrote: »

Hmm, I guess not. For a while they were saying it did. But now I am re-reading an old thread and a correction was made...

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1833964&postcount=281

Thanks. Stills seems that no one knows for sure. As said my experience is that they do not show up. Different from 500px, DeviantArt and Fineart America, from which their were to find after max. two weeks.
I have changed the settings for one gallery and will check after a couple of weeks.

ps
waiting for an official answer...

jasonscottphoto · August 9, 2013

I agree. I un-protected my sample galleries (but no client galleries) after reading that forum thread a while back and all of a sudden a bunch of my photos showed up in google image search...

southeasternphotography · August 10, 2013

WTF??? Say this is untrue - Asking Google directly.
Tell me this is not true. How stupid this would be for SmugMug. The more hits SmugMug gets the greater exposure they can claim to induce users to sign up.

This is HUGE - even more than keywords and copy protection (I know who will laugh at this!!!).

I have made a thread at Google concerning this asking them straight up instead of asking SmugMug. Here is the url to the thread:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/r762nG2rrLA

If you check this out, please add comments if I did not state it correctly. I am not perfect - my wife can attest to that!!!

thenickdude · August 10, 2013

You're not going to get the attention of anyone at Google who has the ability to test or verify that for you. Partly because there is no such thing as a general "right-click protection" and they'll have no idea what specific method SmugMug has decided to use for that.

From the look of the code that SmugMug generates for Google, it looks like there will be no negative impact of enabling right-click protection (your images are still there available in the source for Google to easily find, just like when right-click protection is disabled).

Allen · August 10, 2013

Lamah wrote: »

...(your images are still there available in the source for Google to easily find, just like when right-click protection is disabled).

Without alt and title image tags Google will probably ignore them.

southeasternphotography · August 11, 2013

Well, I was hoping that Google realizes how big the user base of SmugMug is and that someone would look in to it! Haha, maybe my bad! But figured it could not be bad to ask them. If Google gets enough mail or bad feedback from SmugMug users, then MAYBE they will contact SmugMug and try to figure out what is causing our user base to be so up set. And if you (not just you) are not upset that right click protection means your images will not be indexed, then why are you on the internet? Hope this is not taken wrongly, but a final correct answer needs to be established. And I figure that the final answer will come from the indexing company, not from various Smug folks who are guessing what Google is doing.

thenickdude · August 11, 2013

The issue is that Google don't really care if SmugMug images appear in their search listings or not, it doesn't affect their bottom line.

The exact workings of their search indexer are only really known to that development team, and most of the fine details are considered trade secrets anyway.

SmugMug just has regular image tags on the page with regular photos being loaded, regardless of the setting of Right Click Protection. If Google can find any images on the web at all, they should have no trouble finding them on SmugMug.

Allen · August 11, 2013

Lamah wrote: »

..
SmugMug just has regular image tags on the page with regular photos being loaded, regardless of the setting of Right Click Protection. If Google can find any images on the web at all, they should have no trouble finding them on SmugMug.

Sure, Google sees the photos but does not know what to do with them. Without alt and title tags on a
photo all they know is it's an "img". So they have no search terms connected to the photo.

Darter02 · August 11, 2013

So that's why I never find my images when I search...

thenickdude · August 11, 2013

Alt tags are important and SmugMugI really needs to be providing those. But even without them, Google can pick up keywords from the rest of the page content instead and assume the photos are related to those.

Darter02 · August 11, 2013

I'll post what I posted on that forum:

I've found that Google indexes my pages, and they appear when I do a Google search. What I mean is, I've found that Google will show results in the "Web" tab that link to light-box pages of images. It doesn't show any results in the "Image" search tab though. It's only if I use an image embedded into blogger that appear in the "Image" search. I always wondered why, perhaps this is the answer?

Allen · August 11, 2013

They find my photos that I add to my blog real quick but not from Smug. In the blog my photo
links have alt and title tags. This is image search and not web search.

denisegoldberg · August 11, 2013

Allen wrote: »

They find my photos that I add to my blog real quick but not from Smug. In the blog my photo
links have alt and title tags. This is image search and not web search.

I find the same thing. I always include alt and title tags in my blog posts. I find images from my blog in image search more often than images from my smug site.

--- Denise

Allen · August 11, 2013

Looking at the page source of a gallery page the legacy site had alt and title tags taken
from the caption. But NewSmug has blank alt and title tags.

Djm3006 · August 11, 2013

following

ablichter · August 11, 2013

Lamah wrote: »

From the look of the code that SmugMug generates for Google, it looks like there will be no negative impact of enabling right-click protection (your images are still there available in the source for Google to easily find, just like when right-click protection is disabled).

I am not 100% sure, but I doubt that, Nicholas. Crawler do not launch JS nor do they index CSS styles. They just look for links = <a href> and img tags and descriptions.

Make a check at your website and have a look to the source code:
At "Home" no, nada, zero URL for a JPG at all, same for "Browse". Except for your profile image in the header.
In folder and gallery view images have a full URL but its not a <a href> or <img tag>, it's more like a <script src> tag. Here exist an empty (alt="") alt-tag .

In lightbox view here is an alt-tag with holds the title/description, but the URL again is in what I believe is a <script-tag>.
When right-click "protection" is enabled, images are turned into a style element (background image) and those are not indexed by crawler:

style="background-image: url("http://joerglingnau.smugmug.com/Abstract/Birefringence/i-Hs8JTNK/0/L/CRW_20353-L.jpg

Seems the new designs are "nicely" encoded: there is a nice tool for checking existing / broken links. I have run it on southeasternphotography's site (old design).
60.000+ links here for southeasternphotography, with title etc.pp.
Took an hour to parse (click pics):

and just 16 links for (y)our site(s) in new design.

And 14 of them are not belonging to (y)our site or are of interest for us. This are links to SMs (good for them).
There are not even links to folder or galleries.

Nevertheless also image from old designs are hard to find in Google images. If there are some, than because they have been cross-linked by blogs or similar, pointing to a smugmug ownersite.

richpepp · August 11, 2013

Allen wrote: »

Looking at the page source of a gallery page the legacy site had alt and title tags taken
from the caption. But NewSmug has blank alt and title tags.

I think you might be right. You have to remember that Smugmug used to present a special SEO optimised version of their page to the Google spider and that had the caption jammed into the alt tag. The keywords had also been placed near the photo which is what Google loves. It's been a couple of years since I last looked at what the Googlebot sees in detail (using Webmaster tools) but it doesn't look at all like I remembered. What I can see now is that from a peak of 12,000 images in Google I am now down to 5000 and most of those are the thumbnails rather than the full size images.

It may be that Google has changed it's algorithm or they may no longer be happy receiving a different version of the page than the user sees (which is something they claim not to be happy with). It may also be that most of my original 12,000 were duplicates and they are getting better at tidying stuff up.

I think I need to experiment to see how to get the alt text to reappear and see what that does

ps. on the question of right click protection I tried looking at the difference in the code presented to Googlebot with right click protection both on and off and couldn't see anything that would hide the image BUT there is a lot of code and I might have missed something. However, and more importantly, it may be that Google can detect that you have right click protection on and hence hide the image because Google doesn't right click protect it's images. An image that is right click protected on smugmug wouldn't be rightclick protected in Google and they may have decided that that isn't correct so don't show the image. Remember that it takes less that 5 seconds to get a copy of a right click protected image without using any special tools so it really provides no protection at all and is better avoided

southeasternphotography · August 11, 2013

So Jörg, Does that mean my old site has a better chance (small as it is) of getting indexed than when I go "live" (no chance at all) with the new site? Sounds that way. Cool that you used my site as I was going to ask what you saw there!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for the effort! SO, right click protection DOES mean no image indexing? Ummm, my old site has right click protection....confused more!

mbonocore · August 11, 2013

southeasternphotography wrote: »

So Jörg, Does that mean my old site has a better chance (small as it is) of getting indexed than when I go "live" (no chance at all) with the new site? Sounds that way. Cool that you used my site as I was going to ask what you saw there!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for the effort! SO, right click protection DOES mean no image indexing? Ummm, my old site has right click protection....confused more!

Your images will be indexed in the web results with RCP enabled, but not in the Google Image Search.

denisegoldberg · August 11, 2013

mbonocore wrote: »

Your images will be indexed in the web results with RCP enabled, but not in the Google Image Search.

Michael -
Are you saying that if we turn right click protection off that the photos will be indexed in Google Image Search?

--- Denise

richpepp · August 12, 2013

I think Jörg may be right but I'm also not sure that this is part of the new site, I think it may have been here for a while but I no longer have my legacy site to check against.

If you do a view page source for a gallery the only .jpg links you will see are for the first image in a large format with no alt tag and inside script tags. The caption can only be found in relation to a twitter tag. We know that standard web search must run some sort of javascript because searching for a caption picks up the relevant image in web search but not in image search. It makes we wonder if google image search is NOT running the javascript but web search is.

Also, if you pick up the page source from webmaster tools then you see a lot more .jpgs but these are the thumbnail images for the other galleries. Interestingly I see LOTS of these tiny images in google image search.

I might try switching one of my galleries to journal style and see if that changes what google images picks up as with journal style the webbot version of the source uses X2 rather than tiny images

This stuff used to work so well - I wonder what happened

edit: I might try creating a single page with an image embedded using HTML and Alt tags. That should really show up if there is an issue

richpepp · August 12, 2013

and a bit more data. I took a look at the number of visitors to the photo half of our site (hosted by smugmug) and referral traffic to our main site from the photo site and both just dropped off by a factor of 10 last August for some reason. Until then there had been a steady if not huge stream of traffic but now the only peaks I see are when when we distribute explicit links to our photos rather than organic search. I hadn't spotted it as Google AdWords traffic now swamps the referral traffic from the photo site.

I think I need to investigate a bit more

Darter02 · August 12, 2013

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I find the same thing. I always include alt and title tags in my blog posts. I find images from my blog in image search more often than images from my smug site.

--- Denise

I just checked this with one of my images. If I Google my wife's name in Image Search the first image is from my blogger site. I took a close look at it. The "Alt" & "Title" tages are empty. Her name is included in the file name.

For the past year or so I've taken to a naming convention of keeping the original "IMG_XXX" and tacking on the date of the shoot. So now my images are all named something like "IMG_XXXX_20130812." Can you confirm that images found on the image search used the "alt" & "tittle" tags, and not the image file name? I'm hoping it reads both. If so, I will be sure to use those fields in the future. I seldom do as it requires an extra step. With a 5yo running around here all the time, extra steps can be difficult.

richpepp · August 12, 2013

More stuff. Bing images have a better selection of images from my site that also include the captions which means that that stuff is available. However they don't have as many images and the images appear to only be from before August last year when I saw a sudden drop off so it is possible that things have changed since then

For Darter02: Google use both the filename and alt and title tags if available. Smugmug used to stuff the caption into the Alt tag but it isn't clear if this is still happening as it is no longer quite so visible in the source code. As far as I know there is no way for you to directly put anything into the Alt tag - it is directly controlled by Smugmug.

Darter02 · August 12, 2013

richpepp wrote: »

For Darter02: Google use both the filename and alt and title tags if available. Smugmug used to stuff the caption into the Alt tag but it isn't clear if this is still happening as it is no longer quite so visible in the source code. As far as I know there is no way for you to directly put anything into the Alt tag - it is directly controlled by Smugmug.

When I embed an image in my blog I can type into the title and alt fields manualy.

<a href="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/A" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"><img src="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/2/L/IMG_9454_2006-07-25%20%281%29-L.jpg" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]" alt="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"></a>

Right? I usually only enter something into the first title area though.

denisegoldberg · August 12, 2013

Darter02 wrote: »
When I embed an image in my blog I can type into the title and alt fields manualy.
<a href="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/A" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"><img src="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/2/L/IMG_9454_2006-07-25%20%281%29-L.jpg" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]" alt="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"></a>
Right? I usually only enter something into the first title area though.

If there is a caption on the photo the embed links place that caption in both the title and alt fields.

--- Denise

richpepp · August 12, 2013

Darter02 wrote: »
When I embed an image in my blog I can type into the title and alt fields manualy.
<a href="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/A" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"><img src="http://www.ronlutzii-photographer.com/Dance/20060725/i-S8jR5jt/2/L/IMG_9454_2006-07-25%20%281%29-L.jpg" title="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]" alt="[COLOR="Red"]Dancer[/COLOR]"></a>
Right? I usually only enter something into the first title area though.

Ah sorry, I thought you were trying to change it at the SM end. The general rule is for title to be just a simple short title (e.g. Dancer as you have) but Alt text should be much more descriptive as it is intended to describe the image if it doesn't show for some reason e.g. if someone is browsing you site using a screen reader. In this case your Alt text would say something like 'upper body of dancer against a background of shadows from pillars'. This is way more painful but if you were to do a google image search of 'dancer' by itself you are up against a lot of competition. If someone is searching for a specific image then you stand a much better chance if you are descriptive.

If you are going to put the same in both then just use title by itself. If you have the time then the alt text will help. However Google also recognise that people don't do that so often so they will also try to infer what an image is about from the text nearby. If your blog post talks about what the picture is then that may be enough but if you have time then Alt text is good.

Allen · August 12, 2013

denisegoldberg wrote: »

If there is a caption on the photo the embed links place that caption in both the title and alt fields.

--- Denise

Only on the legacy site, the new site for every image has blank alt or title tags. Check the page source
of new site in Smugmug style, all images have blank alt or title tags.

Question about Right Click Protection/Google Image Search

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