webmaster blocked resources and seo problems

pvasimages · February 7, 2016

I have been having ongoing issues with declining page rankings since the re-launch. I am one of the most active wedding / event photographers in my area and add content continuously yet continue to decline. I had been top page google with no effort whatsoever before the redo. I am currently page 1 thru weddingwire but almost non existent elsewhere. Venue/Local keyword image searches ONLY return several year old images. Almost no current photos
There are a lot of keyword related blocked resources. Search query data has almost only galleries from 3 to 4 years ago.

Are there some obvious, fixable technical issues?
We are aware and titling and captioning old wedding galleries that were only key worded in the past.

Thank You
Paul V

leftquark · February 8, 2016

We've taken a number of steps to ensure your SEO remains high while on the New SmugMug, but unfortunately SEO is a bit of a black science. Google has changed the way it determines page rank quite considerably in the last year and we've adapted to everything that we can, since they don't publicly announce what can be done. We've re-optimized your page for mobile, so that they don't discount you on mobile, we provide a sitemap so they know all of your images, etc. The best thing you can do is to tell Google that your page is important by having links point to your site. Keyword, titles, and captions will all help, but without links to your site from multiple sources, it appears google tends to discount sites.

WinsomeWorks · February 8, 2016

The old RCP & image search & SEO problem
Well, I hesitate to get started on this again, but the issue with RCP & image searches (& that effect on SEO) certainly doesn't yet feel resolved to me. Conversation had gotten re-started about it between SmugMug higher-ups & site-owners awhile back, but it trailed off without the most critical questions having been satisfyingly answered. From all I can tell, SmugMug (for the past couple yrs and more) has been back to operating on an earlier assumption it had for awhile (but then changed when some major & active site-owners noticed and complained). That assumption, which turns out to be incorrect for many of us, is that we don't want GIS (Google Image Search) & other image searches to find our stuff if we have RCP (Right Click Protection) turned on.

In other words, currently GIS & other searches are not easily finding your (or at least my images that have RCP turned on. For me, this means that the images getting found by GIS are mainly my family & friends (people snaps) that have no RCP because I want my peeps to be able to download them easily. Yet these are precisely the images I'm least interested in getting found in an image search!! SmugMug should instead be operating under the assumption that if I have my gallery set to "Let me get found in searches" (or whatever it says) set to "YES", then I want to get found. Period. My having RCP on or not shouldn't change what SmugMug does. Yes, I know it may change something GIS does, but in the past, SmugMug as a whole also had some choices & its assumptions mattered to GIS. I'm guessing that's still the case, & apologize if I'm wrong.

I haven't looked to see if the OP has RCP on (forgot to check before chiming in), so I'm just stating that this is one huge issue for those of us who do. I also haven't waded deep into these waters again to learn exactly what SmugMug is helping GIS etc to find at the present time. But it's obvious to me that we're back to square one, or somewhere back in the same situation that went on for some time before it was rectified... GIS simply isn't finding what most of us with RCP want it to find. Just because I have RCP on, that absolutely doesn't mean I don't want my images found! And I know from the lengthy discussions we had on this in the past, that most site-owners will agree with me. If anyone reading this has any power to work at a change for the better on this, please go for it! It's been so sad to me that we've gone backwards again on this & that the issue is getting no love. I just haven't had the time or energy to help something happen.

NOTE: Yes, I completely understand all the arguments about using/not using RCP, how it's very imperfect "protection", etc. etc. etc., & many have heard my rebuttal, so let's not get into the part of the RCP discussion right now... been there, done it. I know for a fact that I've been able to educate many people about photography as copyrighted art with RCP, & also that many are stymied by it. I'm not losing sleep over the few determined people who know how to get around it & rob art every day.

leftquark · February 8, 2016

This is a pretty simple one to respond to, Winsome: enabling the right click message does not prevent your photos from being found on Google. I have RCM turned on and my images are displayed in Google. Even a gallery I recently uploaded is listed

the best way to make sure your photos are indexed by Google is to make google know your site is important: increase the number of links pointing to your galleries and photos. Google may crawl your site and read the site maps and see the images, but it may not be indexing them if it doesn't think it's important enough. They do this to prevent bloat in their search results.

WinsomeWorks · February 9, 2016

I'm only talking about actual image searches, & I didn't say that having RCP turned on in our SmugMug galleries totally prevents the images from getting found. I'm saying that in image searches, it's clear to me that the galleries with RCP on are having a much harder time getting found in GIS & other image searches than galleries without it. I have tons of links pointing to my galleries & photos, & many many more links are pointing to my "art photos", or non-family galleries. However, I can see by my most popular photos & by which galleries / photos show up if I do an image search on WinsomeWorks that it's the galleries without RCP that are getting found much more easily.

During that time period when SmugMug was not assuming we wanted to be hidden if we had RCP on, I'd look for certain photos or galleries that I knew had qualities that should make them easily found. And I'd find them right in the first couple rows even if I had RCP on. But before that period, and also now, they are way back... many rows down, if there at all. Furthermore, photos that I have on multiple sites, even if they have RCP & watermarking on other sites, show up in image searches on all those sites way before the SmugMug ones show up, if they've got RCP on my SmugMug site. That's if SmugMug even shows up. (& that's weird too, as I have way fewer links to any of these other sites. On some of them I do very little, & do no SEO) yet SmugMug, where I do work at that, is so far back.

Look into it... I wonder if you 'll find that in new SmugMug, there's a difference in what is getting served up or "helped along" for image searches, partially based on whether RCP is turned on. Another test I did at one point, & you can try this too, is to check on the GIS status of a few galleries with RCP, after doing Image Search on a few different terms or phrases pertaining to that gallery. Write it down... in what row of images do you show up? Now take off RCP & do those same searches in a couple wks. When I did that, the differences were pretty astounding. I can at some point find some of those convos where this got debated again, & we can see where any resolution on it kinda trailed off.

leftquark wrote: »

This is a pretty simple one to respond to, Winsome: enabling the right click message does not prevent your photos from being found on Google. I have RCM turned on and my images are displayed in Google. Even a gallery I recently uploaded is listed

the best way to make sure your photos are indexed by Google is to make google know your site is important: increase the number of links pointing to your galleries and photos. Google may crawl your site and read the site maps and see the images, but it may not be indexing them if it doesn't think it's important enough. They do this to prevent bloat in their search results.

leftquark · February 9, 2016

When you say "Image Search", what exactly are you referring to, since you bolded it 5 times, indicating that I seem to have misunderstood you? Did I not show you a link to an image search?

Search engines are black magic so it's impossible to say why one thing works and another thing doesn't, but we have looked into this and there's nothing about RCM (note we've changed the name to Right Click Message now, not Right Click Protection) that would prevent Google from indexing and returning your photos.

I had typed up a much longer response, but for whatever reason dgrin decided to lose it. I'll summarize it by saying: Go to a gallery with RCM turned on and you'll see all of the

tags are still there. Google's reading it. Google's reading your sitemap too. They're being told about your photos, regardless of RCM setting.

Teetime · February 11, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

the best way to make sure your photos are indexed by Google is to make google know your site is important: increase the number of links pointing to your galleries and photos. Google may crawl your site and read the site maps and see the images, but it may not be indexing them if it doesn't think it's important enough. They do this to prevent bloat in their search results.

Interestingly, I ran a backlink analysis tool against my site and one of my local competitor's site who is always at or near the top in search results. The findings really perplexed me. My relatively new SM site had 135 backlinks, mostly from forums including dgrin, and a few Facebook links. My competitor - only 10 links and 8 of those were from within his own site. This makes absolutely no sense to me. His site is pretty ugly, but has a huge amount of text in the screens, so maybe it is the large quantity of keywords pushing him higher in searches. I wish I had access to the google analytics list of keywords for his site.

I am beginning to think my SEO strategy is flawed. I thought it would be smart to combine my business and my personal into one SM site. My business has mostly Vimeo videos and one photo gallery. My personal is in a separate top level folder and it contains many photo galleries. I really don't care to ever have the personal photos show in a google search, but they currently do, and I'm wondering if the large number of uncaptioned photos with default system names is causing Google to give my site a lower priority in searches.

So, for those with more SEO knowledge than me, which of these options makes more sense?

1. Keep my combined professional/personal site, but hide the personal side from google. If so, what is the best way to do that yet still give visitors easy access to my galleries? For example, can I submit a separate robots.txt to omit everything on the personal side of my site?

2. Move my professional site out of SM to a separately hosted site and use SM only for my personal galleries. This is how I was setup until recently.

Also, my reasons for combining my professonal and personal under SM were: 1) cost savings, 2) easier maintenance, 3) robustness of the New SM, and 4) excellent support here on dgrin.

leftquark · February 12, 2016

SEO is a little bit of a black box. The only scenario in which I could imagine your personal site would harm your business pages would be if the personal keywords greatly outrank the business keywords. However, the stronger your SEO score on one page, the stronger the SEO score on anything that's linked to it. You could try linking to your business section from the personal page, and see if it helps boost it.

In Gallery settings you can set "Web Searchable" and "SmugMug Searchable" on or off, and that should cover whether or not google shows them (essentially updates the robots.txt).

Teetime · February 12, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

SEO is a little bit of a black box. The only scenario in which I could imagine your personal site would harm your business pages would be if the personal keywords greatly outrank the business keywords. However, the stronger your SEO score on one page, the stronger the SEO score on anything that's linked to it. You could try linking to your business section from the personal page, and see if it helps boost it.

In Gallery settings you can set "Web Searchable" and "SmugMug Searchable" on or off, and that should cover whether or not google shows them (essentially updates the robots.txt).

Thanks, that's good information. I do have a link from Personal to Business. I will remove the personal galleries from web searchable also and see what happens.

pvasimages · February 15, 2016

Glad I could spawn all this conversation. Not sure how threads work but I was hoping to get some help here. I am not an IT guy but know enough to be dangerous. I know there is NO way to drop so far so fast without some explanation. I see some red flags in webmaster.
When I do an images search, I only see images over 3 years old for the most part. Any ideas?
I also see galleries and keywords in webmaster and analytics from several years ago as well.
I know I have a mobile page speed issue. Says "60/100 Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content"
Google search sometimes returns as my only hit, a "keyword Gallery url" that includes a hodge podge of images in no particular order that includes images from private commercial proofing galleries. A horrible representation of my work in general.
Any help is appreciated

Teetime · February 16, 2016

pvasimages wrote: »

Glad I could spawn all this conversation. Not sure how threads work but I was hoping to get some help here. I am not an IT guy but know enough to be dangerous. I know there is NO way to drop so far so fast without some explanation. I see some red flags in webmaster.
When I do an images search, I only see images over 3 years old for the most part. Any ideas?
I also see galleries and keywords in webmaster and analytics from several years ago as well.
I know I have a mobile page speed issue. Says "60/100 Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content"
Google search sometimes returns as my only hit, a "keyword Gallery url" that includes a hodge podge of images in no particular order that includes images from private commercial proofing galleries. A horrible representation of my work in general.
Any help is appreciated

I also have some pages showing up from the previous incarnation of my website - it was a non-SM hosted site but using my current domain name. I learned that Google has a feature under Webmaster tools for removing broken links, but when I started reading about that Google says not to remove them - they will go away after a few months of crawling. Maybe it is just changing times but my original non-SM site started showing up in searches relatively quickly. My SM site is not. Frustrating. I'm going to give it a couple more months and if no improvement I'm going back to an externally hosted site.

KQuinlan · February 20, 2016

I noticed a big drop off last year
I am primarily a wedding photographer, and I noticed a big drop off in how often my Smugmug galleries were getting viewed last year (through google searches). I was normally getting in the 600-800 impressions per day range on all of my galleries a year or so ago (and for a year or two before that), and at some point last year that dropped down to about 200-300 impressions per day. I have noticed a decline on click troughs from my smugmug galleries to my web site recently also. Don't have a clue the reason behind it, or if there is one. Google algorithms changing, or tweaks at smugmug. I remember a few years back we had an even more dramatic fall off from like 800 impressions a day to like 50 in about a month, and they did some changes that seemed to make a difference. Not sure if any of this helps, but figured I would add to the thread.

-Kevin

webmaster blocked resources and seo problems

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