Flickr and Google

bradpowellphoto · February 10, 2009

I have a question and please keep in mind this is not a criticism, just need something cleared up.

Why do Flickr albums show up so far ahead of mine on Google.

For instance, I just spent a day shooting the Chinese New Years Parade in Vancouver.

I created a gallery and put in a gallery description, photo captions, and keywords.

Almost 2 weeks later I searched for it in Google.

A small Flickr album of images from the same parade came up on the 3rd page of search results.

My gallery came up on the 10th page.

I have noticed this is consistent with other Google searches for subjects I have created galleries for.

Any idea why?

Any ideas on how to improve this?

I thought I had done everything to up my Google ratings.

:scratch

ps...in case your'e wondering....I love Smugmug!!

cabinetbuff · February 10, 2009

The reason you loose to Flickr is SEO -- Flickr has a lot more "rank" than your site.

Here's your gallery:
http://bradpowellphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/7257870_A2rtX#466536562_uEisX

and here's the Flickr's gallery:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sillygwailo/sets/72157613251597992/

Now, lets examine why Flickr's gallery gets higher rank and ultimately better position in the SERP:

1) the two most important things that any webpage page has (besides the content) are title and headers.

Your gallery's title:

<title>Pictures of Nanaimo & Vancouver Island. The Scenic Photography of Brad Powell. Tofino, Parksville, Duncan, Courtenay, Victoria, Coombs, Port Alberni, Lake Cowichan, Ucluelet- powered by SmugMug</title>

Flickr's gallery title:

<title>Vancouver's Chinese New Year Parade 2009 - a set on Flickr</title>

Which title is better targeting "Chinese New Years Parade"? Obviously it's Flickr.

Your gallery's h1 header:

n/a

Flickr's h1 header:

<h1 id="title_div72157613251597992">  Vancouver's Chinese New Year Parade 2009 </h1>

Which header is better targeting "Chinese New Years Parade"? Obviously it's Flickr.

2) By design, there are more inbound links to Flickr than your or any other smugmug site for that matter, simply because Flickr's gallery URL doesn't include a <username> subdomain:

Flickr gallery URL format:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/<user>

SmugMug gallery URL format:

http://<user>.smugmug.com/gallery/

Inbound links give better rank. The more number of DISTINCT inbound links point to your site the better rank you will have.

Lets say there are 3 inbound links to three different Flickr galleries which belong to three different users:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/<user1>/...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/<user2>/...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/<user3>/...

Total rank for "www.flickr.com" is 3

Now, same scenario on SmugMug -- 3 inbound links to three different galleries which belong to three different users:

http://<user1>.smugmug.com/gallery/...
http://<user2>.smugmug.com/gallery/...
http://<user3>.smugmug.com/gallery/...

Total rank for smugmug.com is initially ZERO
Total rank for <user1>.smugmug.com is 1
Total rank for <user2>.smugmug.com is 1
Total rank for <user3>.smugmug.com is 1

When you have your gallery on flickr, you, by definition gain all of flickr's accumulated rank. That's a huge advantage. Lets say there's an exact same content with exact same title and heading on Flickr and SmugMug:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/<user1>/GALLERY-ABOUT-Parade
http://<user1>.smugmug.com/gallery/GALLERY-ABOUT-Parade

Google indexes them both, and then you search for "GALLERY-ABOUT-Parade"... Which page do you think is going to show up first? It's the page from the site with higher rank -- Flickr, because it's rank is 3 vs 1 (<user1>.smugmug.com).

cabinetbuff · February 10, 2009

go to google.com and put this in the search box:

site:bradpowellphoto.smugmug.com

then put this:

site:www.flickr.com

What do you notice? Every page title is different on flickr and every page title on your site is the same. You can't pull rank with metatags alone -- not going to work.

shrekie · February 11, 2009

cabinetbuff wrote:

go to google.com and put this in the search box:

site:bradpowellphoto.smugmug.com

then put this:

site:www.flickr.com

What do you notice? Every page title is different on flickr and every page title on your site is the same. You can't pull rank with metatags alone -- not going to work.

Hi Guys,

Denise pointed me to your discussion here. There's an ongoing discussion in this thread as well:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1036608#post1036608

I posted up my stats from Smugmug, Flickr, and Google Analytics to compare.

cabinetbuff, if what you're saying is correct, and I am suspecting it is, then Smugmug will need to revise their recommendations to users to add keywords, captions, descriptions, and hidden gallery descriptions to their photos and galleries as it won't make any significant difference.

Andy · February 11, 2009

shrekie wrote:

as it won't make any significant difference.

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

shrekie · February 11, 2009

Andy wrote:

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

Hi Andy,

Yes, I know it has not been your experience, but it has been the experience of quite a few users and I have uploaded my stats in the other thread to illustrate that this is clearly the case. Is there any official word on this subject from smugmug?

Thanks,

Nelson

caroline · February 11, 2009

Andy wrote:

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

Hi Andy,
Those search terms work fine for your type of business, but for me and many in my situation, I want my work found because someone is searching for specific subject matter - ie landscape of blah blah, they don't need to be looking for ME, and I want my images to appear in a google image search but they don't and as far as I can tell I haven't found any of yours yet when using the title of an image as a search term, although they do when doing just a google search.

Caroline

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

Andy wrote:

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

Andy,

When you search for "westchester portrait photographer" using google.com what do you get? I get the following:

Fairfield, Rockland and Westchester Portrait Photography by Dave Blake
   www.daveblakephotography.com/portraits.shtml 

Portrait Photography Westchester, Portrait Studio Westchester ...
   www.partypop.com/categories/Portrait_Photographers/Westchester.htm 

New York Wedding Photographer Westchester NY - Bob Rothman ...
   www.bobrothman.com

Wedding Photography and Bar Mitzvah Photography in Westchester, NY ...
   www.ericwessman.com/ 

Westchester County Photographers, Westchester County, New York ...
   www.photolinks.com/ResultsPage18.html?COUNTRY=United%20States&STATE=New%20York&CITY=Westcheste

Portrait Photographers Westchester :: Sentinel Photo Studios
   www.sentinelphotostudios.com/portrait-photographers-Westchester/index.html

By the way, lets do another test ... search for your name and one of your gallery names -- go to google and put the following in the search box:

Andy Williams Landscapes for Sale

Here's what I get:

[#1] Moon River Photography -- Andy Williams- powered by SmugMug
        www.moonriverphotography.com/gallery/634937_G88Gj/5 

[#2] My favorites from Andy Williams "Landscapes for Sale"
        www.ttljournal.com/g/81-my-favorites-from-andy-williams-landscapes-for-sale.html

Now, obviously your site will be #1 -- it's got your name in the title of every single page, but what do you see on the #2 position? Not bad don't you think? And it's just after two months of being online

Why do you think we are #2 on this specific SERP? It's because our title/heading is very descriptive and matched the search criteria precisely and because we linked to your site which google knows is the original content.

bradpowellphoto · February 11, 2009

I would really like to hear something "official" from Smugmug about this.

Smugmug is so head and shoulders above everyone else in things like our websites and all their features and all the great support.

But I would like to know I have an equal chance to be found out there in cyber space.

pilotdave · February 11, 2009

Andy wrote:

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

It's understood that there are ways to improve page rank by linking to your site as much as possible and all the other suggestions smugmug offers. But there are also ways to design websites to be search engine friendly. Smugmug looks great, but it's not search engine friendly. It's not a switch you guys can flip. It's a concious effort to improve our pages for search engine compatibility.

One of the solutions is to handle more of the page processing on the server side instead of using AJAX, which makes the visitor's browser put the page together. Maybe that's not doable at the moment because of processing power or something.

But first smugmug has to admit (to themselves, if not publicly) that they have a problem with search engine optimization. Can't fix a problem that they don't think they have.

Dave

caroline · February 11, 2009

pilotdave wrote:

But first smugmug has to admit (to themselves, if not publicly) that they have a problem with search engine optimization. Can't fix a problem that they don't think they have.
Dave

And so we wait for further comment .............

mrcoons · February 11, 2009

I am attempting to go thru the information on this site and in the PDF on this page and thought others might be interested as well.

Hopefully someone smarter than me will find this educational.

jfriend · February 11, 2009

pilotdave wrote:

It's understood that there are ways to improve page rank by linking to your site as much as possible and all the other suggestions smugmug offers. But there are also ways to design websites to be search engine friendly. Smugmug looks great, but it's not search engine friendly. It's not a switch you guys can flip. It's a concious effort to improve our pages for search engine compatibility.

One of the solutions is to handle more of the page processing on the server side instead of using AJAX, which makes the visitor's browser put the page together. Maybe that's not doable at the moment because of processing power or something.

But first smugmug has to admit (to themselves, if not publicly) that they have a problem with search engine optimization. Can't fix a problem that they don't think they have.

Dave

I believe that search engines see non-ajax pages already.

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

jfriend wrote:

I believe that search engines see non-ajax pages already.

google can definitely parse AJAX generated content -- just check their cache. The issue here is the way SmugMug pagination is currently setup -- the page titles don't change so google considers your paginated content to be duplicate. Here's an example:

go to google and put this in the search box (we are searching for a specific gallery key "2880990_X5ooT" which has multiple pages):

site:bradpowellphoto.smugmug.com 2880990_X5ooT

here's what I get:

[#1]  Pictures of Nanaimo & Vancouver Island. The Scenic Photography of ...
      The 2007 Nanaimo Empire Days Parade Nanaimo boasts the oldest annual 
      continuous celebrations of Victoria Day without a break in the entire 
      Commonwealth!
      
      bradpowellphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/2880990_X5ooT - 35k - Cached - Similar pages

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

The key problem here is this:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed."

Now click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included." link and what do you see? At least 10 SERPs of duplicates! Except they are not really duplicates are they? These are distinct paginated pages of the gallery and pages of large versions of images but the way the site architecture is setup google doesn't see it that way.

I will say it again (for SmugMug) -- you can't pull rank with metatags alone -- it's not going to work especially for highly competitive markets -- sure you'll pull your name but when you start competing with SEO optimized sites that target the same competitive keywords as you do -- you'll loose.

Each page (i.e. document) on the Internet must have a unique title/header -- that's just a basic common sense and that's what google bases their engine on. They are #1 and whether you like it or not they attribute to the bulk of the search-engine generated traffic so you have to play by their rules.

SmugMug has SEO issue - there's no doubt about it, it needs to be fixed. But you also have to realize that you cannot compete in SERPs with a social networking site such as Flickr or Youtube.

Both Flickr and Youtube DOMAINS have an enormous page rank which you on your own can never compete with. It's just not physically possible to have as many distinct, reputable inbound links to your personal domain name as Flickr or Youtube already have.

There's a reason why content providers go directly to YouTube and Flickr -- it's to get exposure to the enormous traffic that these sites get. Flickr and YouTube are so big now that they don't even need search engines -- they generate their own traffic!

SmugMug is great for establishing your identity on the Internet by having a good looking site. SmugMug is not the right tool to compete in the SERP with Flickr or Youtube or any other social networking site.

You want traffic and exposure you go to social network, you want identity and face recognition you go to SmugMug. Different tools for the different jobs. It would be nice to have it all in once place so you don't have to duplicate your pictures on different sites and that's what we are working on at ttljournal.com ... But we need your participation to make it work.

bradpowellphoto · February 11, 2009

So if I'm reading this right. One of the best way to bring traffic to my site might be to have a Flickr site with links to my Smugmug site?

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

bradpowellphoto wrote:

So if I'm reading this right. One of the best way to bring traffic to my site might be to have a Flickr site with links to my Smugmug site?

That depends on what the purpose of this traffic is. If you want to sell your images through your SmugMug site then yes, today that would be the best thing to do. They'll find your sample images on Flickr and if they like what they see they'll know how to buy them from you via the link to SmugMug. It's going to be very tedious work on your part to duplicate your images and create links to your SmugMug galleries but yes, it's possible.

If, on the other hand, you want to increase direct, search-engine generated traffic to your site, having your images on Flickr is not going to help you. That's because any link you put to your site on Flickr will have a 'rel="nofollow"' tag to prevent search engines following it. This is done to prevent spam.

At ttljournal.com we don't place 'rel="nofollow"' because we know who our customers are - they are SmugMug fellows. Not only that, but we actually generate links to your original images automatically and pull the original SmugMug image caption so that you don't have to duplicate your efforts in two places.

I can't guarantee that you'll be able to compete with Flickr just because you create a virtual gallery on ttljournal.com but you will certainly increase your chances at getting a shot at it. And if more of SmugMug'ers get on ttljournal.com, eventually we can build up the rank of ttljournal.com domain to the level of Flickr.

So if you want a social network around your SmugMug images -- come to ttljournal.com and help us build it -- it's free and you get all the benefits I described above.

jfriend · February 11, 2009

cabinetbuff wrote:

google can definitely parse AJAX generated content -- just check their cache.

I don't think you understood what I meant. I believe that when Smugmug sees a search engine crawler, they feed it non-ajax pages (like the viewing style "Smugmug Small") to make sure it sees all your content in a straightforward HTML format.

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

jfriend wrote:

I don't think you understood what I meant. I believe that when Smugmug sees a search engine crawler, they feed it non-ajax pages (like the viewing style "Smugmug Small") to make sure it sees all your content in a straightforward HTML format.

If they are in fact switching content for the sole purpose of feeding it to the search engine crawler it's considered spamdexing ...

jfriend · February 11, 2009

cabinetbuff wrote:

If they are in fact switching content for the sole purpose of feeding it to the search engine crawler it's considered spamdexing ...

Look Smugmug has lots of different views of your data. It's actually a client-side cookie that determines which view they serve (whatever the viewer last requested) unless the gallery is locked to a style. When no cookie shows up (as would be the case with a Google crawler), it's up to Smugmug which of their normally served up views to give it. This is not special content just for the search engine - it's one of their views that already exists. Also, all the views serve the same basic data, just formatted differently - hardly much different to what a search engine finds to index (same captions, same titles, same image filenames, same keywords, same gallery names, same category names, etc...). I also believe that they cleared this with Google when they first introduced the ajax view.

You seem pretty quick to condemn Smugmug here. I'm sure things could be improved (can't they always), but there has been some thinking done on this.

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

cabinetbuff wrote:

If they are in fact switching content for the sole purpose of feeding it to the search engine crawler it's considered spamdexing ...

actually now that I think about it further ... the content stays the same so it's probably OK ...

cabinetbuff · February 11, 2009

cabinetbuff wrote:

actually now that I think about it further ... the content stays the same so it's probably OK ...

if in doubt -- read this --> Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages

bradpowellphoto · February 11, 2009

I have to say that I have not understood much of what has been said here.

It is all wayyyyyyyyy over my head.

I love my Smugmug site and since I have started it several members of the photography club I belong to have started their's as well.

But if anyone from Smugmug would like to take a look at my site and give me some easy to follow suggestions that might help some of my galleries do better with the search engines I would be ever so grateful.

I thought I had done everything I was supposed to to make myself as visible as possible.

On Google Analytics I see I get around 7% of my visitors from search engines.

I hope this thread hasnt caused any problems, it wasn't meant to.

cabinetbuff · February 12, 2009

bradpowellphoto wrote:

I have to say that I have not understood much of what has been said here.

It is all wayyyyyyyyy over my head.

These last few posts John and I made -- they really have nothing to do with your issue, it's more of a logistical "how" the page is being fed to the search engine.

The issue you have, competing with Flickr, in the same keyword space, still stands and I tried to explained it in plain English without much of the technical mambo-jumbo in my first and few other posts I made on this thread. If you have any other questions -- fire away I am glad to help!

And as to SmugMug being great -- yes it is, I just convinced my family member to join because I consider them #1 photo archiving and sharing service.

caroline · February 12, 2009

So does all this info we are now aware of mean that the limit in keywords of 30 in number is of little consequence because of the other factors acting against actually being found by google for anything other than my site name/url ?

Caroline

ashishpandey · February 12, 2009

Andy wrote:

Not my experience, at all. Search for

westchester portrait photographer

I don't know Andy if you intentionally ignore others' point about this topic, but I kind of don't seem to get the point you are making. Here is what I get when I search for your suggestion

Note how the titles are playing their part. Google is showing the searched keywords from titles in bold, reminding all of us what a title means
At least what you have experienced is not very reliable. If you can tell us the links you get in your search, we can compare how many of those consistently come up in both your and my search

In any case, we cannot defy the experience of the original poster of this thread.

ashishpandey · February 12, 2009

jfriend wrote:

You seem pretty quick to condemn Smugmug here. I'm sure things could be improved (can't they always), but there has been some thinking done on this.

Sure things can be improved, provided someone tries to do that. You do seem to suggest that someone is doing that. If true, that is indeed the first step in the right direction. However, following the earlier threads; the request for an official response in this thread; and some of the responses from Andy on this particular topic - at least I don't get an indication that someone is looking at this as a problem
I know smugmug is a great service, and I have seen them responding to customer needs in a very nice way (including Andy participation here, which I mostly find quite helpful), and they are innovative. But they are not always right (just like everyone), and sometimes I have seen them ignoring (not acknowledging) issues - a prime example being this topic

DrDavid · February 12, 2009

Just for fun... Try REMOVING your custom page-title text from the site-wide-customization screen and go into a gallery.. See what happens..

David

Andy · February 12, 2009

ashishpandey wrote:

sometimes I have seen them ignoring (not acknowledging) issues - a prime example being this topic

We don't ignore anything. We've 45 people at SmugMug and still we can't possibly reply to each and every posting. But we sure do read everything

digital faerie · February 12, 2009

DrDavid wrote:

Just for fun... Try REMOVING your custom page-title text from the site-wide-customization screen and go into a gallery.. See what happens..

David

I'm too chicken! Show me a screen shot!

caroline · February 12, 2009

DrDavid wrote:

Just for fun... Try REMOVING your custom page-title text from the site-wide-customization screen and go into a gallery.. See what happens..

David

David,
Can you please explain what you mean here ? Is this a helpful suggestion ?
I don't have time to play games with my site and haven't a clue what you are implying.
Sorry for sounding grumpy :-)
Caroline

Andy · February 12, 2009

Hi Folks, good stuff in here. We take great care to do as much as possible to get high results for our stuff on Google. This is a great discussion, and I'll make sure that some key folks get directed to it.

Flickr and Google

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