Can we have a discussion about search engine results?

neophyte · May 18, 2008

My site, powered by Smugmug, http://www.earthphotos.com, has an entire gallery devoted to Namibia. In Google, I typed in "sossusvlei pictures," Sossusvlei being a famous area of desert in Namibia, of which I have a bunch of keyworded pictures in my Namibia gallery.

On Google images, way down on page 24, I found one of my pictures, but it was from my personal website, not earthphotos.com.

I'm not complaining about Smugmug, here. I just hope maybe somebody who's way smarter than me can talk intelligently about how lots of pbase pictures, some pictures from various peoples' personal trip diaries, others from tour operators and then even my own personal website picture would come up before any from my entire earthphotos.com gallery on Namibia.

And how to bump up our pictures in the search results.

What are your experiences? Let's talk it around, if you're game.

Many thanks,

Neo

LUCKYSHOT · May 18, 2008

Neo
First off great site, I almost didnt post back because I was looking at pictures for so long. I am no Key word/ search engine guy but when I go to your site and search sossusvlei nothing comes up??

Are any of your pics keyworded sossusvlei pictures? I dont have to go up against an entire countrys pictures,but when I key word It looks something like this
"Long island image st john of god roller hockey " " roller hockey st john of god " " long island image roller hockey"
I dont leave my key words listed for all to see but I do try and bombard the key word angle
All the best
Chris

Andy · May 19, 2008

No keywords for 'namibia' or 'sossusvlei' on your site afaict...

http://www.earthphotos.com/keyword/

Have you seen this? http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Maximize+Search+Engine+Findability

Follow all those tips and you'll get great results, I promise

neophyte · May 19, 2008

Captions don't aid in search?
Ah, Andy, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you were also using the captions to aid in search. Not true?

Because I was letting them do the work on "Sossusvlei" and "Namibia," since the country name appears in all the captions.
Hey LUCKYSHOT, thanks for the kind words.

Andy · May 20, 2008

neophyte wrote:

Ah, Andy, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that you were also using the captions to aid in search. Not true?

Because I was letting them do the work on "Sossusvlei" and "Namibia," since the country name appears in all the captions.
Hey LUCKYSHOT, thanks for the kind words.

EVERYthing aids in search.. Captions, keywords, album description.

neophyte · May 20, 2008

More Specifically....
Hmm, not really the information I'm after there, sorry. So here's a specific question, Andy:

Above, you pointed me here: http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Maximize+Search+Engine+Findability

It says there that:

We often get asked, "how can I increase my search engine relevance?" Here are some tips.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Add keywords to the photos on your site. All of them.
Add gallery descriptions and photo captions.

Now, to take this case as an example, I have keywords on each photo, and then the words "Sossusvlei" and "Namibia" in many captions in this gallery.

In a post just above, you admonished,

"No keywords for 'namibia' or 'sossusvlei' on your site afaict...

http://www.earthphotos.com/keyword/"

and that is correct. Up until yesterday I relied on the captions to aid in the search for, in this case, the words "Sossusvlei" and "Namibia."

So, are captions used in search or must one necessarily include every last thing in keywords?

That matters, because if I remember correctly, you count 15 key words.

In the case we're talking about here, if as you say "EVERYthing aids in search.." that would suggest to me I could use 15 keywords, then caption the picture "Sossusvlei, Namibia" and in effect get two free key words.

Just need to know what the rules are -

Thanks,

Neo

pilotdave · May 20, 2008

What I find is that google picks up my RSS feeds much better than it picks up gallery results. While captions and keywords obviously help, I think there's a lot smugmug could do to make our sites more search engine friendly. We can only do so much on our end. The real improvements have to be made on their end. That's not to say that we can't improve our own results through the methods they recommend. But I think there are some simple and very complex changes that could be made to the smugmug architecture that would really help.

Simple would be to put our gallery titles in the title bar. Complex would be to alter the actual image filenames to include descriptive information like captions or keywords. I really believe all the pretty AJAX (javascript that makes our pages pretty) has a negative effect on search engine friendliness.

Dave

neophyte · May 20, 2008

Hey pilotdave, thanks for that. You're way over my head technically on ajax javascript, so I don't know about that.

I want to say right here though that overall I love what Smugmug offers.

Before Smugmug I tried writing all the simple HTML code on my own for a much more humble site and this is SO MUCH BETTER. I really think it looks bright and smart and puts me forward in a far better light than I'd ever have been able to on my own.

Okay, so here's the but:

I'm just asking, are the captions, as well as keywords, useful in the search function, or not?

On the page Andy referred me to, above, it appears so. Is that right?

Based on that advice, that captions help in the search function, I've been trying all along to fill up the Smugmug limit of 15 keywords, then add - in effect - a couple of free keywords by including the city and country in all my captions, which on my particular site makes perfect sense.

As you also see above, Andy noted I didn't have the proper "country" and "place" in my keywords. But I had them in my captions. I'm just asking here, was that not the right approach?

Anybody?

Thanks

pilotdave · May 20, 2008

Search engines find words on your site. If the words aren't there, your site won't be found. Keywords and captions are basically the two places you can add words for search engines to find. So yes, definitely use them both. There's no magic to keywords... they're just text that search engines can read.

Dave

neophyte · May 20, 2008

Yep I hear you and I understand that. I don't know why this is so hard for me. I'm thinking I'm asking a kind of specific question, but I'm obviously not making myself clear.

My first post in this string said that I have a gallery devoted to Namibia, and just to see how things work, I typed in "Sossusvlei" in Google Images. Sossusvlei is a place in Namibia and I have many pictures from there in my gallery. After 24 pages of results I didn't see any of my pictures.

I had "Sossusvlei" in captions of pictures from Sossusvlei - not keywords - and then I used keywords to further describe the pictures. Since I didn't turn up any results after 24 pages of Google Image search, I'm just asking if in fact captions do help in the search function, or if, in this example, I have to have "Sossusvlei" in keywords - not in my caption - if I want my pictures to show up in places like Google Images search.

I'm suggesting the utility of the caption in search appears to me less than the utility of keywords.

Know what I mean, or shall I just take the rest of the night off?

Okay, thanks.

neophyte · May 20, 2008

Andy, I see you're moderating here tonight. Could you weigh in on this?

Neo

OffTopic · May 21, 2008

I've got to weigh in on this one because I have been incredibly frustrated the past two weeks after spending hours keywording and captioning before uploading galleries only to find that my images aren't coming up in searches either. I had only done quick checks in the past and didn't notice a problem to this extent, but lately I'm beginning to think that either I or Smugmug have angered the search gods and I've done quite a bit of testing to try to determine where my problem is. Here's what my research is leading me to find:

The search engines (Google, Google Image Search, Yahoo, AltaVista, Microsoft Live Image Search) appear to be only picking up images that a) I have blogged, or b) from my Recent Photos feed. However, I have noticed that if I upload an entire gallery at one time, that gallery is added to my Galleries feed, but the images themselves are not added to my Recent Photos feed, and therefor not being picked up by the search engines. If I upload one photo only to a new gallery, and then upload the rest of the gallery, those subsequent photos will be picked up by my Recent Photos feed and the search engines. However, Google (not Google Image Search) only provides a link to subscribe to the feed, not directly to the image itself, which is basically worthless. Google Image Search specifically only picks ups photos that I have blogged, but at least it also provides a link to my main website in addition to my blog. Unfortunately I frequently blog "story" photos, not photos I would hope that people would find via a search engine.

So basically, hours of keywording and captioning are yielding absolutely worthless results for me right now. As yes, I've done everything else in the tutorial. I'm sure this was all working fine a few weeks ago.

While I'm on the topic of search results I have one more issue:

1. Why is the Smugmug PicLens search limited to 100 photos? When PicLens performs a Flickr search it pulls up hundreds (thousands?) of images. Absolutely every Smugmug PicLens search I have tested only returns exactly 100 photos or less. More and more people are using PicLens to search for images (and why not, it's gorgeous), but this puts Smugmug and its users at a huge disadvantage.

It's late and I'm tired, so hope this all makes sense. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there's just some buggy thing going on right now that can easily be corrected.

mwgrice · May 21, 2008

neophyte wrote:

Andy, I see you're moderating here tonight. Could you weigh in on this?

Neo

Andy's apparently out until the 23rd.

Tomkirk23 · May 21, 2008

Google Search - Need a little help
Hi -

I just opened up my site to Google via Hello World...It has been indexed (not entirely the way I want).

Google is finding a couple of my alternate home pages, but is not finding my overall site URL: www.yoursbd.com

Question: Any idea why? Do I need to specifically put meta tags (robots) in any place specifically? Or is using the overall Hello World and Customize Gallery (to remove any galleries from search) quite sufficient? I am specifically thinking about whether I need to put a meta tag (robots) in the bio box on the home page.

Thanks,

Tom K
www.yoursbd.com

pilotdave · May 21, 2008

neophyte wrote:

I had "Sossusvlei" in captions of pictures from Sossusvlei - not keywords - and then I used keywords to further describe the pictures. Since I didn't turn up any results after 24 pages of Google Image search, I'm just asking if in fact captions do help in the search function, or if, in this example, I have to have "Sossusvlei" in keywords - not in my caption - if I want my pictures to show up in places like Google Images search.

I think you'll find that smugmug images don't show up in google image searches unless maybe in certain cases. Google images uses specific criteria to decide what keywords to associate with a picture. Smugmug's architecture isn't really compatible. If the filenames of the images were changed from random strings of numbers and letters to words that describe the pictures (captions or keywords, for example), google image searches might pick them up. Alternatively, the caption would need to appear right next to the image. It looks that way when we view the page, but not when google does, since there's a lot of complicated code used to form the pages that we see. Google doesn't interpret all that code... so it doesn't "see" our captions next to the images.

Dave

neophyte · May 21, 2008

That's helpful Dave, thanks

Neo

kygarden · May 21, 2008

You might want to do this too: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Google has some free tools to let you register your site with them. I guess it's more official than the normal web crawl they do. They have some custom text (meta data) that you can paste into your customized area on SmugMug and then Google will go look at that to be sure it's there and to confirm the site you just registered is yours (since no one else can put that meta data text they give you on your site). I did this for mine. They've certainly indexed a ton of my SmugMug site....even some I didn't want indexed!...

Andy · May 21, 2008

neophyte wrote:

Andy, I see you're moderating here tonight. Could you weigh in on this?

Neo

You aren't seeing the big sticky post that says I'm actually on holiday

Keywords are very important. I would use them. Google Images are hard to get indexed - they really index images that are linked on a page, via html - like if you embed your photos in a blog post. That's why one of my top suggestions is to have a blog

neophyte · May 22, 2008

You get time off!?

:smooch

Thanks

Erick L · May 25, 2008

pilotdave wrote:

What I find is that google picks up my RSS feeds much better than it picks up gallery results.

(...)

Simple would be to put our gallery titles in the title bar.

Same here. I also found my images along some other member's images in RRS. Some search results also lead to images in single view even though my galleries are Smugmug view.

A good title tag would be awesome. I garantee search results will improve with proper title tags. Do not put the username first, like...

Borealphoto : Photos: Title - Powered by Smugmug

If you must put the username, put it after the title::

Title - Borealphoto:s photos - powered by Smugmug. (I'd rather have the choice for the "Borealphoto photos" bit).

Keywords help but not much. People spam too much so they have little weight. I also noticed keywords sometimes lead to a Smugmug page with photos of several members with the same keywords instead of your own site. (looks like Smugmug.com/keywords/).

Wildone · May 29, 2008

I to have been frustrated with the lack of results on searches through Google. I have a couple hundred images on my smugmug site. All of these images have the keywords san diego, and their san diego location ie. embarcadaro,Old Town, Balboa Park etc. I also try and use these words in most of the titles and in the descriptions. When I do a search these images do not come up. Some of my images that are on Lulu or Photogateway occasionally show up on page ten or so. The images that do show up are frequently someones vacation trip snap shots on pbase or flicker . Smugmug does such a great job of presenting images in the galleries and their other features are great but if we aren't getting search engine play in is limiting.

www.sandiegoimages.net

shfaya · December 7, 2008

Just for curiousity I made a search on Endys Moonriver web site. this are the result
1- I got a keywords from few of his photos "long island sound larchmont". These keywords apply to few photos. I pasted them into google search - and nothing i pasted word "photography" and then he comes but on 5 or 6 possition. without word photography there is no moonriver in results.
2- I made it the same in google pisture search, and again nothing. I searched until 5th page and found no moonriver photography on it. I didn't go further as nobody would.
3- I did it again but this time with a "moonriver" name and picture search shows nothing.

Conclusion- Endy has a very nice photos especialy IR photographs, but even his images are not being visible through the Google image search.

i would like finnaly to find out if there is any way to promote our sites. If Andy being skiled in computer language can't get the results how can i expect to get any?

Maby we should do it a russian way (pay google under the table)?

Andy · December 7, 2008

shfaya wrote:

Maby we should do it a russian way (pay google under the table)?

I have answered the question about Google image search in your other thread on the subject.

Can we have a discussion about search engine results?

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