Can anyone help me figure out one minor customization?

jtbaskin · November 15, 2015

I am trying to get rid of the "keywords" when displaying a gallery and can't seem to figure it out. I have found the settings but no luck and I can turn them off in the "lightbox" but not when viewing the whole gallery? Thanks in advance for any help :barb

annnna8888 · November 16, 2015

Jonathan, unfortunately there is no good way of hiding the keywords but still have them be indexed by Google. If you hide your keywords, Google doesn't like that and will not likely crawl and index them. Please have a look at this:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

That said, some gallery styles show the keywords, such as SmugMug and Journal, but not the collages, for example, so you might want to change the gallery style: from the gallery, click customize > gallery style.

Ana
SmugMug Support Hero

leftquark · November 16, 2015

If you still want to get rid of the keywords, you can use the following CSS code (add a CSS content block to your site in the Customizer, under "All Galleries"):

/* Remove the keywords below the gallery */
.sm-tile-keywords {
  display: none;
}

WinsomeWorks · November 16, 2015

Would love improvements to keywording & clearer info about indexing
I've seen this statement before from people, (that hiding keywords is definitely bad for Google indexing), but the article often provided with this statement doesn't exactly back it up, as it's referencing hiding text or keywords in a different way or for a different reason. If this is definitely true (& I'm not saying I don't believe it...), are there other references you can present that are more pertinent to what some of us here on SmugMug are trying to to with keywords?

In other words, here's what the first sentence linked below says: "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines..." However, what I'm saying & doing have nothing to do with trying to manipulate search rankings. And most of us, if we're hiding keywords with CSS, are only wanting keywords to not show to our visitors (i.e. when we're logged out). In that case, we're not hiding them to manipulate anything, we're simply not showing them under photos to guests because they're cluttery and/or not useful to them. Furthermore, none of the ways we're asking to not show them are in the list of things provided there that Google sees as bad. (i.e. white text on white background, teensy fonts, etc.) Only showing keywords when logged in, isn't on the list as a no-no. Again, I'm not saying I don't believe it, but I'd like to see evidence for this particular Google penalty (that Google penalizes the site if it doesn't show keywords to visitors thru CSS) if it's true. [ETA: unless that's what "moving text off-screen with CSS" means... I wasn't reading it that way, but idk...]

I would also like to suggest that if there's something SmugMug doesn't like about us not feeling like having our keywords visible to our guests, then SmugMug could really help us out by making a couple changes. (or even if the visibility doesn't matter to SmugMug, these changes would still help your users) 1, our keywords are so obvious & prominent now-- by default they're in a larger font, each separated by a bar, & set closer to our title or caption than they were in Legacy. Yet it's much less obvious that they're clickable, which makes it somewhat useless showing them. 2-- worse, if you have a lot of Smart Galleries as I do, the "View in Original Gallery" (or similar) text (to see where that original photo actually resides) that used to be more visible is now by defaultbelow the keywords as well as in a very small font. (Yuck!!) 3-- Comments too are below keywords now-- it's just so much stuff weighing down the right side in SmugMug style.Since I tend to shoot a lot of plants & nature, & lots of them have necessary keywording done for stock, there may be a long list of keywords, & few of my visitors would have reason to see that cluttery keywording beneath each photo. They can go to my search page if they do.

One further issue with keywords that still plagues us in New SmugMug (& I'd hoped would get fixed) is that there's still no indication of which, or how many, of the keywords in our lists under each photo are actually being indexed by SmugMug. In Legacy, only the "1st 30" keywords were indexed, though few people knew that, & few knew which 30 were indexed! (was it the 1st 30 as displayed, or the 1st 30 alphabetically, or what?) In New SmugMug, there's still no indication, & it's highly annoying to not know if certain ones are being indexed, esp. if you're adding them for a Smart Gallery to use.... what if it's #32 on your list & you don't even know? Most of the stock sites I'm on, as well as FAA, Panoramio, etc. allow 50 to 80 keywords (& lots of nature or landmark items easily use up 50, when you account for scientific names, locations, colors, etc. etc.) so we don't even have a reason here on SmugMug for why we'd only be allowed 30... or if it's still the case. And we truly wish to not need to spend time doing specific keywording for SmugMug unless it's truly necessary, such as for individuals in family photos or sports team members or something like that. So... lots of further enlightenment & improvement about keywording would be very helpful.

annnna8888 wrote: »

Jonathan, unfortunately there is no good way of hiding the keywords but still have them be indexed by Google. If you hide your keywords, Google doesn't like that and will not likely crawl and index them. Please have a look at this:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

That said, some gallery styles show the keywords, such as SmugMug and Journal, but not the collages, for example, so you might want to change the gallery style: from the gallery, click customize > gallery style.

Ana
SmugMug Support Hero

leftquark · November 16, 2015

With the New SmugMug you can now keyword (and we index) much more than 30 photos. Though remember that while you can do this, you want to keep your keywords relevant, non redundant.

It's unclear exactly what Google/Search Engines do (SEO is a bit of black magic) so no-one can say for certain if removing/showing keywords hinders search results. Remember they use content on the page, so it's likely it may help. Hiding them certainly won't hurt (negative score) but you probably lose the positive score. Unless of course they read the EXIF information on images (which I hope they do). Who knows.

Lastly, remember that Google/search engine only see's your site as a logged-out visitor. They don't know the concept of being logged in.

WinsomeWorks · November 16, 2015

I think you mean that you'll index much more than 30 keywords per image... hmm, well that's great news, but, OK, there must be an exact number of keywords per image that SmugMug indexes, right? I'd like to know what that number is, & have the input area showing me when I'm past it. Or do you mean there's not a limit? (which reminds me of a bug I need to report-- it's a drag adding keywords because when you click the pencil icon, you're never taken to the end of the keyword list, whether in lightbox mode or SmugMug style preview photo mode... you have to arrow over to the end of the list if you want to add them to the end, & you also can't see the whole list... it's a real pain.)
Yes, I figured Google only sees the site logged out, but hard to know quite how it works, because even if I've hidden them under a photo preview, it's still seeing them in my keyword list on keyword pages, etc. Oh, and uhh... there are other search engines!!! We never seem to talk about them, but I show traffic from lots of others. Yes, I know about redundant keywords-- this is a tough one too, because unfortunately searches work differently on practically every site I'm on. (esp. how they treat multiple-word keywords, hyphens, etc.) so often I've keyworded for several eventualities out of necessity. Some sites (like iStock, via Getty) have a "controlled vocabulary" which is a whole other animal. Anyway, the main point is that who wants to keyword differently for every site they're on? Not me.

leftquark wrote: »

With the New SmugMug you can now keyword (and we index) much more than 30 photos. Though remember that while you can do this, you want to keep your keywords relevant, non redundant.....
Lastly, remember that Google/search engine only see's your site as a logged-out visitor. They don't know the concept of being logged in.

leftquark · November 16, 2015

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

I think you mean that you'll index much more than 30 keywords per image... hmm, well that's great news, but, OK, there must be an exact number of keywords per image that SmugMug indexes, right? I'd like to know what that number is, & have the input area showing me when I'm past it.

Unless you're adding a LOT of keywords (more than I can imagine), you won't hit the limit. It's high enough that you can enter the keywords you want but also not infinite to the point of making search slow down.