Hi All,

I recently bought my own domain (bay-photography.com) however I was checking webmaster tools for my old domain (bayphotography.smugmug.com). Under sitemaps I show:



TypeProcessedIssuesItemsSubmittedIndexed
1

/sitemap-index.xml
Sitemap index
Apr 16, 2012
-
Web
372 - submitted
43 - indexed

Images
167 - submitted
0 - indexed


I was curious if this meant that there were zero images indexed for when people search for images. If so, I was wondering why this would be so. I have my settings set to "yes" for hello world and hello smuggers, and have accurate names for categories, descriptions, and keywords. I also have links back to my site on my blog and on forum sigs.

I did a google image search for site:bayphotography.smugmug.com and the only hits come from my blog, and from images posted on various forums.

I am only familiar with the basics of SEO, but would like to ensure that image / web searches are ranking my smugmug site (now with my new domain).

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi,

Google web search and Google image search are two entirely different matters. Google web search pretty much indexes everything it comes across that it's allowed to index, but with Google image search, it takes more to get indexed. Your photos not showing on Google image search is not indication that Google cannot index your content - you can see that they can by your content coming up in Google web search.

As a general suggestion to improve your search engine ranking, check out and follow the suggestions on our SEO page using your new custom domain.
It's always helpful to have other sites link to your content. A good way is always to start a blog where you feature your own work. Then maybe you can also get other blogs or sites to link and feature some of your content? Naturally, the higher ranked / more reputable a site, the better.

Note that with the newly added domain, Google has basically to start over on indexing your new address and it may take some time before your custom domain search results have a better ranking.

Thanks for the response. I do have a blog, which l link back to my site. I also post my images on forums and use my website address in my sig. I have also been uploading new images with relevant names, as well as adding accurate titles and tags.

Does google prefer a certain image size? I notice a lot of my images from my site show as 100x100. Would this have anything to do with the view size I allow on my site?

Thanks again!