Question on keywords and searches

Richard · December 28, 2007

Let's say I have a gallery named Madrid and I enter Madrid as one of the keywords for that gallery. Is there any reason to also enter Madrid as a keyword for each of the pics in the gallery? I am curious about both the behavior of the Smugmug search and the behavior of Google indexing.

Thanks,

papajay · December 28, 2007

rsinmadrid wrote:

Let's say I have a gallery named Madrid and I enter Madrid as one of the keywords for that gallery. Is there any reason to also enter Madrid as a keyword for each of the pics in the gallery? I am curious about both the behavior of the Smugmug search and the behavior of Google indexing.

Thanks,

I think the answer is, "It 'depends' on what behavior you're looking for".

SM's search results are displayed in 3 sections..."Keywords matching Madrid", "Galleries matching Madrid", and "Photos matching Madrid".

Even if you didn't "keyword" at all, the search would still find your 'Madrid' gallery based upon the fact that you used the name in the gallery name/description. But you wouldn't get any "photo" hits (until you clicked on a 'gallery' hit on the search results page, which will then take you to the gallery itself).

If you want to see the thumbnails of all the photos on your site that were taken in/around Madrid (you might have lots of them across many different galleries, for example), then I'd suggest you use the bulk keyword editor to "flag" all the 'Madrid' photos. In that case, even if you did not have 'Madrid' in the gallery name/description, the search would still find the individual photos keyworded 'Madrid'.

EDIT: sorry, I just noticed you asked about Google indexing, which I did not address...my reply was only about SmugMug search. I'm not sure how many Google hits you would get if you keyworded every photo. I set my site to thwart Google using SmugIslands blocking, but use the SM search all the time, and love the ability to run fairly "sophisticated" searches there. For example (assuming I keyworded my photos correctly), I could run a search to find just those pictures taken in 'Madrid' that have 'me' and my 'wife' in them by just entering all three keywords in the SM search box... other 'Madrid' photos (the ones that do not have 'me' AND my 'wife' in them) would not show up in that particular search.

Hope this helps.

Andy · December 29, 2007

rsinmadrid wrote:

Let's say I have a gallery named Madrid and I enter Madrid as one of the keywords for that gallery. Is there any reason to also enter Madrid as a keyword for each of the pics in the gallery? I am curious about both the behavior of the Smugmug search and the behavior of Google indexing.

Thanks,

Gallery keywords are for SmugMug's search engine... photo keywords will get picked up by Google. As will gallery titles, descriptions

http://wiki.smugmug.com/display/SmugMug/Maximize+Search+Engine+Findability

Richard · December 29, 2007

Andy wrote:

Gallery keywords are for SmugMug's search engine... photo keywords will get picked up by Google. As will gallery titles, descriptions

http://wiki.smugmug.com/display/SmugMug/Maximize+Search+Engine+Findability

Got it. Thanks, Andy and papajay.

Cheers,

jefflennan · February 15, 2008

Galleries Found When Searching Key Words
I am trying to figure out the way SM deals with gallery keywords. You will see from my list below that a. and c. seem to work as expected, but b. im having trouble with. In my ideal world, when you searched say "Jill Humphrey" you would get:

Here's that search on my site:
http://horses.smugmug.com/search/index.mg?searchWordsShort=jill+humphrey&searchType=InUser&NickName=horses

a. keywords matching this - for some reason this gives my keyword "jill" but not keyword "jill humphrey". is this bc of the "keyword short" indication in my search form code?
b. galleries that have this keyword in their keywords (although it seems you cant use more than one keyword (for instance "jill humphrey" in gallery keywords) AND any galleries that have any pictures in them with this keyword

c. photos with this keyword (check)

On the contrary, if you search "ulmer" on my site like this:
http://horses.smugmug.com/search/index.mg?searchWordsShort=ulmer&searchType=InUser&NickName=horses

You get the right results:

a. keyword ulmer
b. gallery with 'ulmer' in the gallery keywords
c. photo w 'ulmer' in keywords

jefflennan · February 15, 2008

Currently I have two galleries that have jill humphrey in the gallery keywords. When I search Jill Humphrey, one of them shows up and one does not.

Can someone help w what I am missing? Thanks

papajay · February 16, 2008

jefflennan wrote:

Currently I have two galleries that have jill humphrey in the gallery keywords. When I search Jill Humphrey, one of them shows up and one does not.

Can someone help w what I am missing? Thanks

Hi Jeff:
Let me take a stab at part of this...not because I'm confident I have the "answer", but because I continue to be intrigued with how keywords "work" and yet don't always don't seem to work exactly as expected in SmugMug.

When search results say "Nickname's galleries matching [keyword]" , the search for the keyword(s) looked within the gallery title, the gallery description, and the keyword field under "customize gallery" for the search term

Let's say your gallery description contained a phrase like "The photos are from my cousin Sally's steeplechase competition".

If you entered the following [cousin steeplechase] (without the brackets, of course) in SmugMug's search box, you'd get a hit in the Gallery results, and zero hits in the Photo results (unless the words "cousin" and "steeplechase" happened to also be keywords on the same picture, or if both words appeared anywhere within in a caption for an individual picture.

Just for grins, I tried entering the name you used in your example, "Jill Humphrey" (WITH the quotes) as a keyword in the Customize Gallery keyword box on one of my galleries. Then I went to my home page and entered "Jill Humphrey" (again WITH the quotes) in the SmugMug search box and the search did, in fact, result in a gallery Hit. Curiously, though, when I went back to the Customize Gallery page to remove the "Jill Humphrey" keyword, it wasn't visible in the keyword box! I can't explain that...it appears to be a small bug having to do with the quotation marks (I'm guessing).

I'm guesing you may have entered "Jill Humphrey" in one gallery keyword box WITH quotes, and in the second gallery WITHOUT the quotes. WITH quotes will be treated as if it was one word...WITHOUT quotes will treat each as a separate keyword.

Apologies for the loonggg response...but I hope it helps (and is accurate).

jefflennan · February 16, 2008

papajay wrote:

I'm guesing you may have entered "Jill Humphrey" in one gallery keyword box WITH quotes, and in the second gallery WITHOUT the quotes. WITH quotes will be treated as if it was one word...WITHOUT quotes will treat each as a separate keyword.

Thanks papajay

I think a critical question here is whether or not we can use quotes around multiple keywords for GALLERIES. I dont believe that we can.

My second post on this also raises the question of why when I have jill humphrey (no quotes, but with commas like [ulmer, jill humphrey, smith] on two galleries, and search [jill humphrey] (no quotes) I get one of the galleries, but not the other.

papajay · February 16, 2008

jefflennan wrote:

Thanks papajay

I think a critical question here is whether or not we can use quotes around multiple keywords for GALLERIES. I dont believe that we can.

My second post on this also raises the question of why when I have jill humphrey (no quotes, but with commas like [ulmer, jill humphrey, smith] on two galleries, and search [jill humphrey] (no quotes) I get one of the galleries, but not the other.

\

I can't write or decifer software code, but I can always "experiment"!

It appears you can, indeed, enter multiple keywords with quotes around them when they contain a phrase or multiple words or numbers) in a gallery keyword field in the Customize Gallery screen, and SmugMug search will find them.

I entered the following:
"test 1" "test 2"
(with the quotes and the space between to two, just as you see it above) into the gallery keyword box in one of my galleries, then logged out and went to the "home' page for my site. I entered "test 1" (with the quotes) in the SmugBug search box, and the search result found my gallery. Same result for "test 2". Just entering "test" (without the quotes) also resulted in the gallery being found.

[as indicated earlier, however, when I logged back in and returned to the Customize Gallery screen to remove the "test 1" and "test 2", neither of them show up in the gallery keyword box any more....definitely a bug, IMHO].

I'll leave you to experiment with commas...I have never used them, and don't think they will work.

Andy · February 16, 2008

jefflennan wrote:

Thanks papajay

I think a critical question here is whether or not we can use quotes around multiple keywords for GALLERIES. I dont believe that we can.

My second post on this also raises the question of why when I have jill humphrey (no quotes, but with commas like [ulmer, jill humphrey, smith] on two galleries, and search [jill humphrey] (no quotes) I get one of the galleries, but not the other.

Could we have links please to both galleries?

jefflennan · February 16, 2008

Andy wrote:

Could we have links please to both galleries?

Thanks Andy and papajay. I appreciate the assistance.

Gallery #1 with gallery keywords [jill humphrey, mandy porter]
http://horses.smugmug.com/gallery/4338530_Tvc7B#255049998

This is the only gallery that comes up when you search my site for [jill humphrey]

Gallery #2 with gallery keywords [HITS, Thermal, Indio, jill humphrey]
http://horses.smugmug.com/gallery/2464842_rQpm5#129275382

This gallery does not show up on the [jill humphrey] search

papajay · February 17, 2008

jefflennan wrote:

Thanks Andy and papajay. I appreciate the assistance.

Gallery #1 with gallery keywords [jill humphrey, mandy porter]
http://horses.smugmug.com/gallery/4338530_Tvc7B#255049998

This is the only gallery that comes up when you search my site for [jill humphrey]

Gallery #2 with gallery keywords [HITS, Thermal, Indio, jill humphrey]
http://horses.smugmug.com/gallery/2464842_rQpm5#129275382

This gallery does not show up on the [jill humphrey] search

Jeff:
I'm gonna GUESS here....and my guess is that you may have entered "jill humphrey" (with quotes, perhaps??) in the GALLERY keyword field (the one you only see when you go the the Customize Gallery page) for only the one gallery and not for the other. If your site behaves as mine, we may never know for sure because if you go back now to the Customize Gallery page and check what's in the gallery keyword box, the entry with quotes won't be there anymore!

It's just a theory, but it would explain why your search results find "jill humphrey" in one gallery result, but not in the other. Adding the keyword "jill humphrey" on individual PHOTOs (using bulk editor, etc) will not cause the GALLERY search to find it, only the PHOTO search.

Andy · February 17, 2008

I really don't know, but I re-indexed the one gallery that didn't show up - let us know in a day or so if it starts to pop up.

jefflennan · February 17, 2008

Andy wrote:

I really don't know, but I re-indexed the one gallery that didn't show up - let us know in a day or so if it starts to pop up.

OK thanks. Ill do that.

I tend to agree with papajay's theory but need to re-investigate. I think the gallery keywords are taking quoted keywords, but not showing them as such when you go to the 'customize' screen.

Question on keywords and searches

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