Optimizing Google Search Results

peestandingup · October 27, 2005

OK, I posted this question a couple weeks ago & my thread got moved to the Mind Your Own Business area of Dgrin, for some odd reason. So, im gonna ask again.

Why doesnt my Smugmug page show up in a Google search anymore??? It was always there before, now its gone. Used to, all you would have to type in Google was "Kerry Bailey Photography" or even my entire name & my page would be one of the first hits, now its nowhere to be found anywhere on Google.

This is kinda a big deal for me because thats how allot of people find my site, by doing a Google search for it (including my parents who arent very computer literate BTW). Can someone PLEASE fill me in on whats going on??

And for pete's sake, please dont move this thread. This is clearly a support issue. Thanks ;-)

Andy · October 27, 2005

kerry, did you by any chance do this?

btw, you're third in line on google now .... from your last thread posted on dgrin...

Andy · October 27, 2005

there may be something in your co-branding, or something else, prohibiting the indexing of your page... we'll get to the bottom of it i'm sure. in the meantime, there's lots on dgrin here that's relavent, if you use the search you'll find some posts... here's one:

there are some good tips in this thread particularly the mike lane posts...

are you keywording? this helps alot.

i'm wondering if you did anything in your co-branding that could have caused this. perhaps one of the cobranding experts will know the right sort of question to ask.

did you read this, in myob?

btw, your first thread was moved, becuase getting the most out of google is a myob thing more than it's a smugmug support thing. that being said, we're going to try to help you!

jfriend · October 27, 2005

Search yes on msn and yahoo, no on Google

peestandingup wrote:

Why doesnt my Smugmug page show up in a Google search anymore??? It was always there before, now its gone. Used to, all you would have to type in Google was "Kerry Bailey Photography" or even my entire name & my page would be one of the first hits, now its nowhere to be found anywhere on Google.

This is kinda a big deal for me because thats how allot of people find my site, by doing a Google search for it (including my parents who arent very computer literate BTW).

If I search for "Kerry Bailey smugmug" on Yahoo, I find one of your galleries as the very first hit.

If I search for "Kerry Bailey smugmug" on MSN, I don't see any hits to you. If I search for "Kerry Bailey site:smugmug.com" on MSN, I get only one hit and it's your site.

If I search for "Kerry Bailey smugmug" on Google, I don't find your page at all, but I do find your dgrin questions about Google. I'm not sure why that would be. Clearly your page is up there for indexing since the other sites can see it. The other sites don't seem to rank it very high, but that's a different issue.

Have you made any recent changes to your site (like removed a password or removed any meta tags) that might take a little while for Google to see?

I'd suggest you read/do the things Andy referenced in his email to maximize your visibility to Google and then if that still doesn't do anything, you'll have to try emailing the help@smugmug.com helpdesk and see if they have any further suggestions. I looked at the HTML for your main page and don't see anything obviously wrong.

jfriend · October 27, 2005

You might want to check your customization HTML

peestandingup wrote:

Why doesnt my Smugmug page show up in a Google search anymore??? It was always there before, now its gone. Used to, all you would have to type in Google was "Kerry Bailey Photography" or even my entire name & my page would be one of the first hits, now its nowhere to be found anywhere on Google.

Something I just noticed. I don't know if this is tripping up Google or not, but I think you have some HTML errors in your page, probably due to your customization. I haven't spent much time looking, but I see a </a> with no corresponding <a> before it in your footer. I think you may also have at least one <div> in your footer that doesn't have a closing </div>. It might be worth looking some more at your customizations. Again, I have no idea if this it stopping Google, but it's certainly worth fixing anyway.

[[EDIT: It appears that the extra </a> tag is a smugmug bug that is present in most people's pages so this is probably not something you caused. I've reported it both in the forum here and to the help email address. The missing </DIV> is something that is present in some other pages, but is not present in the unmodifed pages I've seen so it may be caused by your customization. There's also an extra </SPAN> in most gallery pages that appears to be a smugmug issue and I've reported that too.]]

peestandingup · October 28, 2005

Thank you guys for helping me. Andy, I looked at all those links & tried a couple small things but nothing worked. I tried searching for some of my keywords on google & got nothing. My page is just gone. :cry

And I havent changed any cobranding in my page in quite a while. Perhaps something happened when they updated the site??? And I dont see any funky cobranding in my page, but to be safe a couple weeks ago I just went in and hit the Update Cobranding button to see if that would help, but nothing. I have some cobranding in my Bio, but lots of other people do too.

rainforest1155 · October 28, 2005

I guess your page was banned for whatever reasons. Here is an detailed answear of what you have to check and where to reapply for google. Your code seems to be fine. I saw during my search that other people also experience this and that it might be a problem with some new software over at google.

I would contact them and explain the situation and hopefully you'll be back in google soon.

Sebastian

flyingpylon · October 28, 2005

I don't think it was actually banned. It still shows PageRank (though it's only 1 out of 10 which is abysmal) and if you search Google with site:kerrybailey.smugmug.com you do get one result.

I've had a site banned before (confirmed by Google) and PageRank was a 0 and literally no results were displayed with a site: search.

Andy · October 28, 2005

peestandingup wrote:

Thank you guys for helping me. Andy, I looked at all those links & tried a couple small things but nothing worked. I tried searching for some of my keywords on google & got nothing. My page is just gone. :cry

And I havent changed any cobranding in my page in quite a while. Perhaps something happened when they updated the site??? And I dont see any funky cobranding in my page, but to be safe a couple weeks ago I just went in and hit the Update Cobranding button to see if that would help, but nothing. I have some cobranding in my Bio, but lots of other people do too.

sounds like you got some good advice here.... let us know how you make out with google, kerry

dragon300zx · October 28, 2005

peestandingup wrote:

Thank you guys for helping me. Andy, I looked at all those links & tried a couple small things but nothing worked. I tried searching for some of my keywords on google & got nothing. My page is just gone. :cry

And I havent changed any cobranding in my page in quite a while. Perhaps something happened when they updated the site??? And I dont see any funky cobranding in my page, but to be safe a couple weeks ago I just went in and hit the Update Cobranding button to see if that would help, but nothing. I have some cobranding in my Bio, but lots of other people do too.

I think the biggest thing to understand here is that this really isn't a smug issue. It is a issue with the search engines and how they decide to rank your page. SEO isn't a science it's more of a gamble and sometimes you strick it rich and other times you bust.

Jamoke · October 28, 2005

My Site too
I've worked for months, at trying to get google to index my page. My wife and my names are keyworded on quite a few pictures, and I even started hosting my site at an external server. I've submitted my site a number of times, and have added more and more keywords over the last 3-5 months. And yet Still if you do a search for stickspics.com it finds 3 things on D-Grin before it even finds my website. Geeze! How does D-Grin do it? Their indexing is extremely high. Yet Stickspics.com was being hosted by Smugmug and it didn't get picked up for 2-3 months!!! Yet Yahoo Picked it up (And ALL my keywords) within 1 month. Yahoo seemed to be more on the ball than google, which shocked me.... but I'd try searching Yahoo as well.

I searched for you - "Kerry Bailey Photography" didn't work without the quotes. When I put the quotes into Yahoo it found you instantly.

I've talked with a few of the SmugMug folks, and they said that it was a google thing... Which makes sense because so many other search engines have cataloged quite a few of my SM pages... But it still is weird that D-Grin results are rated higher than the actual domain registered page (Stickspics.com). Strange....

Jamoke · October 28, 2005

Submit your site to Google
You could Try manual Telling Google to find you. Within a week of submitting my site there I had 2-4 Pages cataloged by google...

peestandingup · October 31, 2005

Hmm, sounds like im not the only one with this problem. Thanks everyone for giving me some great advice.

Jamoke, I submitted my site to Google again by using your link. I will let you all know how it turns out. Thanks again!

Andy · October 31, 2005

Thanks for coming back, and letting us know you saw all the great advice

do let us know how you make out with the google gods, will you?

peestandingup · November 8, 2005

Just to let everyone know, my site is back on Google now. It seems that the link that Jamoke posted did the trick. So to anyone else having this problem, just use that link & tell Google to put your page back into their search results. It took about a week, but its all good now. Thanks everyone!

Andy · January 1, 2006

Google Alert
I'm guessing that what you did worked

flyingdutchie · January 1, 2006

Andy wrote:

I'm guessing that what you did worked

But still, Google returns the result as:
http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com
and not as
http://www.kerryryanbailey.com/

Anyone knows how to 'tell' google to use your preferred URL/hostname instead.

I have not been able to do that yet with my site either. I even used 'Google Sitemaps'. But on smugmug you can't 'verify' your site and i think Google thinks that one site is a copy of the other and favor's the 'older' one.

HvnyMem · January 5, 2006

I'm not sure what is causing your problem but a key thing search engines look for is keywords that match site content. If you search for your name it should show up in your website's code on every page possible as well as your keywords.

Links to your site from numerous other sites will also boost your ranking. Try to get links to your Smugmug page on other sites. Your "Home" link in your smugmug custom header is a link from smugmug to your site. There are numerous free listing services that will link to your site.

marketingtool.com, wedj.com, onewed.com to name a few.

I don't think your problem has anything to do with Smugmug or how they code your custom look.

If I search Google for Heavenly Memories I hit #3 through 5 and my smugmug page is #7.

If I search for Heavenly Memories Photography my home page is #1 and my smugmug page is #6. 13 out of the first 14 reference my site in some way.

I only show this as an example that linking boosts ratings. Some of the best (active) links I've got come from sites not related to photography but from sports sites (armwrestling) I've shot pictures for. Diverse active links boost search rankings.

I wish I could give you specific code to add but my son is my webmaster.

Go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=20921&topic=356 "My site's no longer included in the search results. What happened?"

Webmaster guidelines: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Improve your site's rankings: http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=480&topic=357

I hope this helps.

(edited for typos) and to add:
Guess you got the problem solved before I posted this. I should have read the second page of the thread before replying.

peestandingup · January 8, 2006

flyingdutchie wrote:

But still, Google returns the result as:
http://kerrybailey.smugmug.com
and not as
http://www.kerryryanbailey.com/

Its weird because when I searched for my site a few days ago, it showed up in Google as kerryryanbailey.com, but now its showing up as my regular smugmug style address.

I really dont know what Google changed to make it do that, but its pretty annoying.

flyingdutchie · January 8, 2006

peestandingup wrote:

Its weird because when I searched for my site a few days ago, it showed up in Google as kerryryanbailey.com, but now its showing up as my regular smugmug style address.

I really dont know what Google changed to make it do that, but its pretty annoying.

I know, it is a little frustrating! I'd really like to be able to 'verify' my preferred URL (and then hoping that is works!!

). But Smugmug is looking into this 'verification' issue.

Optimizing Google Search Results

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