Google dropped me like Bush in `08

gwsim · June 4, 2007

I'm fairly new to smugmug, and I'm primarily using it to market and sell my event photos. I have read through the forums on smugmug SEO and I've taken steps to implement the suggestions by adding descriptions, captions, and key words to my galleries and individual photos. I've been pleasantly surprised to watch my ranking for a particular gallery (the Muddy Buddy in Austin, TX) move from page 12 to page 1 on Google when searching with key words I added, namely muddy buddy, Austin, and photo. It was indexed on page three of Google when using key words muddy buddy Austin. I checked today, as I do periodically, and couldn't find my gallery within 50 pages using the same combination of key words. If I search within the results, I do find my gallery, but it is for all practical purposes invisible. The more concerning part is that I find no smugmug user's galleries. Previously I would find several other users who also shot the Muddy Buddy on different years and in different states. Is smugmug experiencing some systemic problem? Has anyone else experienced this? I'm very concerned, and so far help has been anything but helpful. I will give kudos for their being prompt, but prompt doesn’t fix the problem.

The gallery I’m referring to is on my homepage: Glennon.smugmug.com. It is the muddy buddy, one of my featured galleries. I purposefully did not add these key words, descriptions, etc to the mini muddy buddy gallery as an experiment. I never find it on Google, as would be expected.

Smuggers please help!

Glen
www.glennonsimmons.com

rainforest1155 · June 5, 2007

I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with being found on google. The thing is smugmug has no influence on how google ranks sites and it is known that pages can drop down from the first page to one of the last pages from one day to another. It's not public on how there ranking works behind the scenes. As you said yourself you're still in the search results and therefore haven't been banned from it.
Don't refrain of using keywords - just keyword everything and read again through this thread for more advice. Eventually you'll gain in your ranking again.

I believe it is not a smugmug problem you're facing here, but just to sure check you're settings on the new smugmug feature to opt-out of search engines: SmugIslands.

What you can still do is registering your site with the Google Webmaster Tools and gain a little insight in how the google bot works on your site. There you can also schedule that the googlebot should reindex your page and see for what keywords your site ranks highest.

In the end: Google is not the only search engine out there and one shouldn't just rely on Google. A lot of people are also using yahoo or even msn etc.

Hope this helps a bit,
Sebastian

richW · June 5, 2007

You might want to combine some of your common keywords to make them one unique phrase.
From: austin muddy buddy to “austin muddy buddy”

Also the bulk of your images were added to your site in the last week of May, could be your site just hasn’t been crawled by the search engines yet.

side note: if you could, don't change font colors. dgrinners trying to view with light color themes won't be able to see the text...

gwsim · June 5, 2007

Thanks for the replies...
Thanks for the replies. After reading a few blogs, I think google may have made some changes that are affecting my smugmug search rankings. It is not affecting my other accounts featuring the same images and key words. I would encourage everyone to check to see if they have or have not been affected. I'm going to try and learn more about what changes google recently implemented to see if I can apply any new strategies to my smugmug account. If I find out any info that is relevant to other smuggers, I post it hear. If you could, please search for one of your own galleries that you know is indexed on google, and let me know if your rankings dropped. Obviously this only works if you have been tracking your gallery in searches, and you have some idea of what your ranking is. That would help me troubleshoot whether I did something that killed my ranking or if it is a more systemic change that is affecting everyone. And just as an aside, the reason I think this is potentially a smugmug issue is because I see webshots, flickr, pbase, brightroom, and others in my search results, but no smugmug anything, from any user. It is as if smugmug has been filtered out of the results. I find my respective galleries from other accounts (webshots and flickr) on the first page of search results, even though I ony posted a “best of gallery” featuring less than 20 pictures to each. I even find my blog, which I find quite amazing. Unfortunately, I see zero smugmug results. I know I’m obsessing, but I’m simply must get results, especially when other products are delivering. Thanks for the help.

rainforest1155 · June 6, 2007

I just found google's webmaster guidelines and wondered especially about the duplicate content and keyword stuffing guideline.
I mean with all the pro users having custom domains smugmug is producing a lot of duplicate content. Same goes for keywords - many Pros keyword a lot, but then decide to hide them for cleaner pages sake, but isn't that exactly what the guideline is proposing against?

As much as I like having a custom domain, I feel much better by also having the duplicate smugmug subdomain at my disposal in case my domain goes down for whatever reason.

I would like to hear some comments from the smugmug team on what they think about those guidelines and if smugmug is maybe currently violating parts of them or not. This should be of interest to many Pro's that are struggeling with google rankings.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Andy · June 6, 2007

rainforest1155 wrote:

I just found google's webmaster guidelines and wondered especially about the duplicate content and keyword stuffing guideline.
I mean with all the pro users having custom domains smugmug is producing a lot of duplicate content. Same goes for keywords - many Pros keyword a lot, but then decide to hide them for cleaner pages sake, but isn't that exactly what the guideline is proposing against?

As much as I like having a custom domain, I feel much better by also having the duplicate smugmug subdomain at my disposal in case my domain goes down for whatever reason.

I would like to hear some comments from the smugmug team on what they think about those guidelines and if smugmug is maybe currently violating parts of them or not. This should be of interest to many Pro's that are struggeling with google rankings.

Thanks,
Sebastian

keyword stuffing is/was typically done by webmasters - they'd write up a zillion keywords, and color them white.. then put them on a white background on the web page. Not good, in fact, AFAIK, Google has a way to spot this.

At SmugMug, your keywords are visible to Google even if you use CSS to "hide" them. This only stops them from being seen by the viewer on-screen - they are still there in the rendered code. And the robots will see them.

rainforest1155 · June 6, 2007

Andy wrote:

At SmugMug, your keywords are visible to Google even if you use CSS to "hide" them. This only stops them from being seen by the viewer on-screen - they are still there in the rendered code. And the robots will see them.

That's what I actually meant. This maybe better refers to the guidline of hidden text and links. Here's a quote:

guidelines wrote:

When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

Isn't that exactly what is done here on smugmug?

Sebastian

iamback · June 9, 2007

Andy wrote:

keyword stuffing is/was typically done by webmasters - they'd write up a zillion keywords, and color them white.. then put them on a white background on the web page. Not good, in fact, AFAIK, Google has a way to spot this.

That is indeed one technique for keyword stuffing but there are many others, such as adding lots of keywords to the document title, or to alt atributes.

Andy wrote:

At SmugMug, your keywords are visible to Google even if you use CSS to "hide" them. This only stops them from being seen by the viewer on-screen - they are still there in the rendered code. And the robots will see them.

Hiding keywords with CSS is - in the search engine world - just another way of keyword spamming and is not appreciated - it ranks right there with hiding keywords by making the text color the same as the background color. It is only a matter of time before search engines penalize "techniques" like this - if they are not already doing it (they won't tell).

Another matter is that I found the code as generated by SmugMug is actually very SEO unfriendly. The major issue being lots of identical document titles for lots of very different pages (like different galleries, different keywords...). The document title is about the single most important thing to be indexed and thus should preferably contain keywords that actually describe the page content: things like gallery names and keywords (as you would also see them while browsing, or in breadcrumbs) are exactly the kinds of phrases to include in the document title (just don't make it too long, two or three elements are nice). This is important in two ways:

Search engines use this as a major clue for indexing and ranking pages for specific keywords; and
In the search results pages the matching pages will be listed by their document titles which helps humans to recognize whether or not it is a page they might want to view.

I've seen a thread here on dgrin which discusses JavaScript code to alter a document title - that's fine and probably helpful for humans while they are already viewing a page, but it won't help them finding that page: search engines won't interpret JavaScript (unless possibly to detect keyword spamming) and thus will not, cannot, index the altered title as part of the document: they only see the practically meaningless (wrt the page content) SmugMug-generated standard document title so this is what will appear in the search engine results pages.

There are other issues with the generated code and how it (negatively) influences search engine behavior, but this is by far the major one.

Racetog · June 10, 2007

I got the boot as well!
My site ranked very high, most of the time, top three for the keywords I felt folks would search for… Photos from a recent event I shot were selling at a good clip, then nothing… Did a google search and my site is gone, like it was never there. That’s why I’m on this board checking if others have had the same thing happen.

iamback · June 10, 2007

gwsim wrote:

The gallery I’m referring to is on my homepage: Glennon.smugmug.com. It is the muddy buddy, one of my featured galleries. I purposefully did not add these key words, descriptions, etc to the mini muddy buddy gallery as an experiment. I never find it on Google, as would be expected.

Google has your site, it's just ranked very low. I tried the following ([ --- ] shows what goes into the search field):

["muddy buddy"] (with the quotes): about 48,000 results
["muddy buddy" Austin photos]: 775
["muddy buddy" Austin]: 608 (note that just adding the word photos actually widens the search!) - it's also interesting to note that www.smugmug.com/keyword/all/austin/1/155869169/Medium (with one of your photographs!) comes up on results page 3 while I don't see your site in the first 10 pages
["muddy buddy" Glennon]: 32

The last one was just to check whether goggle has your site in the index: it does. It's also the only one where your site comes up on the first results page - but of course it's not a "realistic" search, I did that only as a check.

Google hasn't dropped you - you just end up lower in the rankings. That can be caused by a lot of things: Google may have (once again) changed its ranking algorithm; or there are many other (new) sites that are competing with you for these keywords. More sites means that it's harder to get on the first pages; and the stronger the competition, the more important it is that your pages are SE optimized.

I'll say it again: the code SmugMug generates for our pages is far from SE optimized. As you get more competition for keywords, the more of an issue this becomes.

That said, keywords and code aren't the only things search engines look at, incoming links from highly-ranking sites also help to crank up your rating. But even if a site has many incoming links, a search engine bot is not going to make up relevant keywords, and it's not going to read through the code beyond a certain cut-off point, so better code will always help.

[But your home page and other pages under your own domain (not SM-generated) can do with some work as well - to put it mildly - since on the pages I looked at there's hardly any indexable (textual) content at all, and what there is is not in best places. But I didn't see any gallery on your home page at all - though I found some linked from an "events" page but located on SmugMug]

iamback · June 10, 2007

Racetog wrote:

My site ranked very high, most of the time, top three for the keywords I felt folks would search for… Photos from a recent event I shot were selling at a good clip, then nothing… Did a google search and my site is gone, like it was never there. That’s why I’m on this board checking if others have had the same thing happen.

What's the URL of your site? I'd be glad to take a look but I'd need to know where to look.

Racetog · June 10, 2007

www.racetog.com

iamback wrote:

What's the URL of your site? I'd be glad to take a look but I'd need to know where to look.

iamback · June 11, 2007

Racetog wrote:

www.racetog.com

Hmm, interesting. Apart from the usual HTML problems in SM's code and a script tag inside the body (yours, I think) which is also invalid I see nothing that Google or other search engines would dislike specifically.

I don't know what keywords or phrases you're checking but I tried a few:

"2007 SCORE Baja 500" (with the quotes, taken from body text) about 896 results, and at position 9 (first page!) I find www.smugmug.com/community/offroadracing
2007 SCORE Baja 500 Race Photos (no quotes, from body text) about 114,000 results, with www.smugmug.com/community/offroadracing and www.smugmug.com/community/offroadracing/keyword/trophy at position 3 and 4, and www.racetog.com/2007%20SCORE%20Racing%20Photos (category, not your home page) at position 8 (very good!)
"2007 Baja 500" (with the quotes, taken from document title) has about 17,800 results - neither your site nor the community page in the first 10 results pages

So Google has you all right - but there are many competitors. And specific search strings/phrases can make a lot of difference. It seems you have done a lot on the page already that you can for SEO, even adding meta description and keyword tags of your own (though I doubt that helps since SmugMug's meta description and keywords tags are there too, and come way before that).

So why is the community page coming up before yours, when the top of the page is literally the same? Could be incoming links, or it could be the list of keywords on the community page. For other sites, simply more popular sites with more "quality" incoming links could make them score higher than yours.

One easy hint to improve your SEO: make sure that images you embed in your page have an alt attribute: an alt attribute is always required for an img tag (even if it's an empty string for a purely decorative image) and can play a role in indexing by search engine bots. An alt text should be written to replace the image when it isn't shown or cannot be seen. Now, you may not think blind people would visit a photography site (though some do), but search engine bots effectively are blind. This implies that when you have an "image of text" where (most) humans can read the text in the image, then the alt attribute should contain that text. For links, title attributes are also useful: they can give the visitor information about the target of the link, and the text may be picked up by a SE bot as well.

For instance for your banner you have:

&lt;a href="http://www.racetog.com">&lt;img src="http://www.racetog.com/photos/105045443-L.jpg" width="700" height="118" border="0">&lt;/a>

You could change this to:

&lt;a href="http://www.racetog.com" title="Race Tog Photography home page">&lt;img src="http://www.racetog.com/photos/105045443-L.jpg" width="700" height="118" border="0" alt="Race TOG photography - images for the extreme">&lt;/a>

Now, alt attributes are read by most search engine bots, so this gets your company's name and motto in there "for free" since you need an alt attribute anyway. You can go one better: words that are inside document title, and in heading tags (h1 - h6) normally rank higher (are considered more important), and your header effectively is your page heading. You can simply wrap a h1 tag around the whole thing like this:

&lt;h1>&lt;a href="http://www.racetog.com" title="Race Tog Photography home page">&lt;img src="http://www.racetog.com/photos/105045443-L.jpg" width="700" height="118" border="0" alt="Race TOG photography - images for the extreme">&lt;/a>&lt;/h1>

(make sure the link (a tag) is inside the h1 tag, not around it, which is invalid.)

Having a h1 tag with just textual content is better than one with an image, but a h1 tag with an image with alt text is better than just an image with no alt text, and far better than no h1 tag at all.

dogwood · June 11, 2007

iamback wrote:

Having a h1 tag with just textual content is better than one with an image, but a h1 tag with an image with alt text is better than just an image with no alt text, and far better than no h1 tag at all.

I notice if I put an h1 tag around my banner image on my main page, it bumps the banner down a bit. Just an observation.

iamback · June 12, 2007

Controlling whitespace for h1

dogwood wrote:

I notice if I put an h1 tag around my banner image on my main page, it bumps the banner down a bit. Just an observation.

No problem; you may also note a bit of extra whitespace below your banner - you can adjust that with your CSS (stylesheet). Try adding this to your stylesheet section:

h1 {margin: 0; padding: 0;}

That would get rid of any extra whitespace around (margin) and within (padding) the h1 tag.

If you want to limit it to the top, try this:

h1 {margin-top: 0; padding-top: 0;}

JamesJWeg · June 12, 2007

I bet this may have something to do with thier push of the Picasa services. My smugmug results for keywords also dropped greatly.

James.

dogwood · June 12, 2007

iamback wrote:
No problem; you may also note a bit of extra whitespace below your banner - you can adjust that with your CSS (stylesheet). Try adding this to your stylesheet section:
h1 {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
That would get rid of any extra whitespace around (margin) and within (padding) the h1 tag.

If you want to limit it to the top, try this:
h1 {margin-top: 0; padding-top: 0;}

Cool-- this was very helpful. Also, I really appreciate your other SEO tips. My site is already doing well in the search engine listings, but tips like this are much appreciated since we all know how important high search engine rankings can be!

iamback · June 12, 2007

dogwood wrote:

Cool-- this was very helpful. Also, I really appreciate your other SEO tips. My site is already doing well in the search engine listings, but tips like this are much appreciated since we all know how important high search engine rankings can be!

Glad to help!

Racetog · June 12, 2007

Thank you very much for the great advice! Pretty sure I found the problem with this... I had added "SCORE" to the title and removed it before you had a chance to look at it. When the 'spider' hits the site again hopefully I go back on top. Funny thing is that most of the guys on top right now are friends of mine. Hopefully, they don't see this post and figure out what I'm doing

BTW- orders have picked up again!

Thanks again,

"2007 Baja 500" (with the quotes, taken from document title) has about 17,800 results - neither your site nor the community page in the first 10 results pages"

richpepp · June 14, 2007

Our site appears 'dropped' as well
Hi gwsim (et al)

I too was wondering if Google had changed something recently. We used to come top or very high for image searches like 'tajikistan flood prevention', 'afghanistan water' or even 'armenia gavar school' but now we have completely disappeared off of some of those searches when we used to be all over the place :cry . MSN still appears to be ok

If I check using google webmaster tools there doesn't seem to be anything blocking the indexing, the pages have been indexed recently and have been being indexed for quite some time now.

I'll go through the suggestions on this thread (and another that came up recently) but FWIW and in case it sheds any light I have also made two changes recently:

1. We've started to use CNAME to have photos.miseast.org instead of miseast.smugmug.com. However photos.miseast.org has a very low google rank as most links are to miseast.smugmug.com (and I guess we benefit from the rank of .smugmug.com)

2. We've uploaded a shedload of archive images lately that aren't properly commented or keyworded yet. I wonder if that negatively impacts us in some way.

I'm not really looking for an answer here as I guess we have the same problems as the others here. I just wanted to say that we have recently seen this with google as well and to add some info. to the pot if that helps

Good luck to all

Richard

iamback · June 15, 2007

richpepp wrote:

I too was wondering if Google had changed something recently.

Whether they have, or not, I do not know. All search engines (ir)regularly change their algorithms and leave everyone looking for their sites.

But consider this: you've changed nothing. If SmugMug also changes nothing, the pages will be exactly the same, a SE bot will notice that, and undertake no action.

Now consider this: you've changed nothing. But SmugMug has changed something and the page looks fresh to a SE bot - which will then grab its content and had it over to the indexer. Which will do all the calculations afresh - and possibly come up with a different ranking.

So it's quite possible to see rankings change in search engines (not just Google) because of changes SmugMug made, while you changed nothing at all.

rdlugosz · June 15, 2007

I would really like to see a future SM update address the Page Title issue. There are a lot of people around here who discuss SEO/their search results in the google and the single title across all pages problem comes up all the time.

It's not a difficult change, but I'm sure its low on the priority list. Maybe one of these days...

Montesa · June 15, 2007

iamback wrote:
Now, alt attributes are read by most search engine bots, so this gets your company's name and motto in there "for free" since you need an alt attribute anyway. You can go one better: words that are inside document title, and in heading tags (h1 - h6) normally rank higher (are considered more important), and your header effectively is your page heading. You can simply wrap a h1 tag around the whole thing like this:
[B][URL="http://www.racetog.com"][IMG]http://www.racetog.com/photos/105045443-L.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/B]
(make sure the link (a tag) is inside the h1 tag, not around it, which is invalid.)

Having a h1 tag with just textual content is better than one with an image, but a h1 tag with an image with alt text is better than just an image with no alt text, and far better than no h1 tag at all.

Hi,
could you explain how I could do this with my banner? My site is http://montesa.smugmug.com I don't understand where I would add that (or exactly what to add). I've set up my banner using the tutorial by Ivar and my code looks like this:

#my_banner {
display: block;
position: relative;
width: 750px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
margin-bottom: 10px;
background: url(http://Montesa.smugmug.com/photos/161605785-O.jpg) no-repeat;
}

Is it something that would go in the CSS section or elsewhere? Thank you very much for any help you can offer. I'm learning so much from this community, but there's always something new to learn!

Thanks!
Montesa

Racetog · June 17, 2007

Folks here can give you much better advice but I adjusted mine from the control panel in the header area. The way I did it is to cut the html then paste into an html editor, Dreamweaver and added the “alt” text.

Montesa wrote:

Hi,
could you explain how I could do this with my banner? My site is http://montesa.smugmug.com I don't understand where I would add that (or exactly what to add). I've set up my banner using the tutorial by Ivar and my code looks like this:

denisegoldberg · June 17, 2007

Montesa wrote:

Hi,
could you explain how I could do this with my banner? My site is http://montesa.smugmug.com I don't understand where I would add that (or exactly what to add). ...

Is it something that would go in the CSS section or elsewhere? Thank you very much for any help you can offer. I'm learning so much from this community, but there's always something new to learn!

Thanks!
Montesa

Montessa -
It goes where you refererence the div that contains your banner. In my case, I have it in the Head tag (on the customization page). What you have in your post is the css for your banner - but you are referencing in somewhere else in order to display the banner.

There is an example showing what it looks like in this thread: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=63794

--- Denise

richpepp · June 18, 2007

iamback wrote:

Now consider this: you've changed nothing. But SmugMug has changed something and the page looks fresh to a SE bot - which will then grab its content and had it over to the indexer. Which will do all the calculations afresh - and possibly come up with a different ranking.

So it's quite possible to see rankings change in search engines (not just Google) because of changes SmugMug made, while you changed nothing at all.

mmm - I wonder if that is what has happened. Whatever it is it is quite drastic though. If I now do a Google image search on miseast.smugmug.com it now only shows pretty much only images from home page and one gallery when it used to show lots of images. In fact our pages appear much higher in the main web search than they do in image search so maybe the images aren't being indexed in the same way any more. It is very noticeable that nearly only of the photos that ARE indexed are from the home page.

Anyway - it is clearly working for other people so I'll just have to play with the keywording etc. to see what can be done. Maybe it is even something to do with which page styles folks are using as I notice that the smumug style that we normally use doesn't appear to have any direct photo links in the HTML (as far as I can see) whereas the 'traditional' layout has both direct links to photos AND the description in the alt text for the photo which appears to be important.

Richard

kml · June 18, 2007

Marjolein,

Thanks for posting all the SEO tips for the banner. After much playing around with the code and the CSS, I finally got it to look correct in FF and IE7.

Your time spent explaining and posting is much appreciated!

iamback · June 18, 2007

Montesa wrote:

my code looks like this:

#my_banner {
display: block;
position: relative;
width: 750px;
height: 150px;
margin: 0 auto;
margin-bottom: 10px;
background: url(http://Montesa.smugmug.com/photos/161605785-O.jpg) no-repeat;
}

Is it something that would go in the CSS section or elsewhere?

Yes, that bit should go into the CSS section.

Try this:
If you see code with a lot of angle brackets, that's HTML, if you see curly brackets, colons and semicolons (like what you show here) that's CSS. Something that looks different than those two is likely JavaScript and if you see "function" in there (or "if" and "else" and angle brackets and some semicolons) it almost certainly is. That's three different languages and in the customization page they each go into different boxes (normally).

dogwood · June 18, 2007

richpepp wrote:

Maybe it is even something to do with which page styles folks are using as I notice that the smumug style that we normally use doesn't appear to have any direct photo links in the HTML (as far as I can see) whereas the 'traditional' layout has both direct links to photos AND the description in the alt text for the photo which appears to be important.

Richard:

Not sure that it's that simple-- I am CONSTANTLY working on SEO for my site and not through page styles.

Do you have a blog? If not, start one (or two-- search engines LOVE blogs) and load it with the kind of stuff you want listed-- words, alt tags, links to your site, titles in the html links, headlines-- all that. I have a blog that is nothing more than a big ol' advertisement for my website.

Load your bio up with SEO words-- use complete sentences but write them using keywords galore. You can always hide it. Use gallery descriptions and load those with keywords too-- again, you can always hide them. Get other people to link to you site and use your url on forums. Track your stats-- having a slow day? Post some pics (and a link of course) on a really busy forum like dpreview. People will click over to your site. I don't pretend to know how the search engines work, but I do know they tend to more prominently list sites that get more traffic.

And consider a myspace page-- again you can load it with links and turn it into a big ol' free advertisement for yourself. Change the myspace inbox to a message telling people to contact you through your website-- the more clicks and visitors you get, the more search engines will take notice of your site.

Your footer should also be loaded with SEO words-- stuff like your hometown and words people are likely to use to search for your site.

Those are just a couple of tricks that seem to work well for me. Maybe they'll help you out?

iamback · June 18, 2007

richpepp wrote:

Anyway - it is clearly working for other people so I'll just have to play with the keywording etc. to see what can be done. Maybe it is even something to do with which page styles folks are using as I notice that the smumug style that we normally use doesn't appear to have any direct photo links in the HTML (as far as I can see) whereas the 'traditional' layout has both direct links to photos AND the description in the alt text for the photo which appears to be important.

Alt text for photos is definitely important for "indexing photographs" - because search engines can only index text. There should be sensible alt text for each photograph regardless in which context or theme it is shown!

(For instance I noted that the "bio image" has no alt attribute (not even an empty one), while the same image shown in its gallery does have alt text (the caption, which is a good choice), as well as a title attribute.The latter is how it should be done everywhere for each photograph, regardless where shown.)

bham · June 18, 2007

Well I did a search and this thread was a result of the search "Muddy Buddy Austin TX" it came up on the second page, third result. Just FYI

Google dropped me like Bush in `08

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