FWIW, the first collection description I checked turned up my AW collection. Google can read and use the AW collection description to rank, and as you can also see below Google can read the Pixels and FAA image descriptions as well.
That said, for several reasons (as explained on many threads) it can be tough to get your AW to rank well compared to FAA.
What I am also seeing after a few more very quick checks, including an FAA site only check of a few collections is the collection description is only being considered on my AW pages. The others may be being ignored for various reasons.
I am happy with the AW receiving priority ranking, though it may not actually be due to priority. Your mileage and results may vary.
I'm talking about phrases in the descriptions not showing up at all, not where they rank, although a unique phrase should show up alone.
It appears random so far. I don't want to post people's descriptions here as examples without their permission, but so far I'm seeing it happening with a lot of the same people who are complaining about a lack of sales or decreasing sales.
I simply replied to your OP and tested some of what you surmised.
"I just did a quick test to see if what we put in the description field for our collection would be picked up by google.
Apparently they are not, not for FAA, not for Pixels and not for our AW's
Also, descriptions for individual images are only being picked up for FAA, not for Pixels or our AW."
You said AW collection descriptions are not being picked up by Google and they are on my AW pages.
You said Pixels and FAA image descriptions are not being picked up by Google and in some cases, they are as shown above.
That said, it appears it may be hit and miss with image descriptions being prioritized and some other stuff and that is probably due to the way Sean has formatted/SEO'd the different sites and pages, the robots.txt limitations put on some of the pages, and the canonical tags he uses, as well as Google overlooking some of the content due to it being duplicate and/or copied content and/or Sean's measures to counter the possible penalty since a lot of the same content is bieng reproduced in various forms on many sites and pages.
I'm talking about getting the " no results found" message for Phrases searched for with quotes that should always appear if google has spidered that page.
And not pages that have been put up recently.
And I've double checked that it's not just my pages by checking the pages of a number of people who have had the images and collection page that I've tested up for a long time. Years in fact.
Your stuff might be showing up because you're using a custom domain.
Being found in search is being indexed/ranked...if it is not found it has not been indexed/ranked for that phrase for whatever reason. Yes, while a custom domain is difficult to rank for various reasons it *may* be helping a bit with the collection description but I have done no testing to verify or disprove that notion.
As you can see on my screenshots everything I have posted here so far has been straight Google and it's the same whether I go to Google or just type the phrase in my browser. I have not been using site:fineartamerica.com. I just mentioned that for those that don't want to dig through pages of results for common keywords and phrases.
For those that want to see if your stuff is indexed for whatever put your keyphrase in google like this to check your own stuff on FAA
If Google has indexed it for the phrase then it should be there.
That has nothing to do with all of the ranking/indexing I have shown you other than the fact that if it's there in the web index it should be there in the site index. Again, I simply suggested that as a way to see common keyphrases that you may be buried 100 pages deep in the whole web search.
If the stuff turns up in the site index then it's in the web index somewhere.
Again, all of the indexing/ranks I have shown you were from straight Google web searches, they were not from FAA site Google searches.
You have your FAA/Pixels/AW linked to your own domain.
That appears to be allowing google to spider those pages.
I've tested this with selections from a bunch of people who have complained about sales and none of their descriptions have shown up from collections so far and descriptions copied from individual images have only come back with FAA pages.
As I have demonstrated above, my image descriptions are being picked up on FAA as well but the collection descriptions seem to only be picked up from my custom domain. Albeit, that's with very limited testing but nothing I have tested so far makes me believe anything different.
FAA and PIxels are not linked to my custom domain but my Pixels AW is set up as a custom domain, it's not a redirect.
Nothing turns up but you have 42,000,000 results to compete with Decorative photographs and images suitable for kitchen decor without quotes. Nothing turns up for that specific keyphrase in site search either.
Mine are not and so far most of the other peoples that I've tested.
Pick some other FAA artists and test some of their collection descriptions.
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I just googled a large snip in quotes from one of my collection description.
I got a lot of mixed results. Links to various places.
My exact unique wording ends up with links high-jacking to another persons site. I see this commonly.
An image of mine will click through to an unrelated theme & site...often my image isn't even on the site.
They just used my image to get clicks to their site.
I checked some of yours and it's hit and miss. Some descriptions are being picked up and some are not. The ones that are are coming through your custom domain.
"Lucky to have this great nursery local here in Central Florida, great plants and trees and great people too! Been going here for many years and it just keeps getting better!"
If you put that in google, including the quotes, you get the message:
No results found for "Lucky to have this great nursery local here in Central Florida, great plants and trees and great people too! Been going here for many years and it just keeps getting better!".
DID JUST CHECK! Some appear and some don't! How can that be? I would think that as far as "code", only one way or the other? Should I assume that if descriptions aren't being "seen" by Google, it could potentially affect search results and thusly, negatively affecting our sales?
I suggest others try this and see what you find, let David know.....I'll be checking MORE of my stuff....
Here's the old "collection" description that did show up in a Google search:
"Cars photographed at the Local Winter Park Miller's Ale House, in Central Florida."
Here's the new version:
Cars photographed at a Mid-Florida Mustang Club Car Show, in Winter Park, Florida. Here at the Miller's Ale House, in Central Florida. Photography by richfrancocars.com
I think this is better.....? Any improvements you can think of?
I got nothing with a quote from my Abstract collection like David.
Interestingly I got an image when I googled a phrase from my Going To The Dogs collection (no phrases but one of my images in the Image section of the search).
The description has more good content in it than the old one, but you could write a novel worthy of a Pulitzer and put in there and if something is hiding the collections page from googles search bot it's as good as empty.
Thanks for the info! Probably NOT writing a novel for each collection, but will try to improve each description. In a "perfect" world, do you know where Google would "look" for words that are searchable in this FAA site? Are we missing something we should be investing time in....?
Right now, the only searchable place that we know of is the individual image description field.
The keyword field is used in the FAA internal search, but uses the keyword meta tag which google now ignores.
Your title is also searchable. It's probably a good idea to create titles that are descriptive of the image rather than some esoteric name.
There's also an alt tag that google will find, but we don't have access to it.
Every image format also has an area in it that contains the IPTC metadata info and file info that can be filled out with a lot more info.
Google supposedly indexes that also if it still exists in the file, however, many websites strip it out to reduce the file size and we don't know if FAA is doing that when it creates the display images and thumbnails.
In my own recent experiments and research into this, the title is overwhelmingly the single most important thing to Google. I can find a few of my images fairly high in Google results based on searching words in the title. However, I can't really find any of my images at all if I search for combinations of words in the keywords or description.
Sadly this is a problem for me because I used creative, sometimes conceptual, titles for my work that an art buyer is highly unlikely to be searching with. I ended up going thru and renaming nearly all of my titles to be literal descriptions of the photo but that has the bad effect of breaking all of the links in Google, so now I'm basically starting all over again to get things to appear as I need them to.
I think part of the reason the title is so overwhelmingly important, especially in Google Image search, is that the title is applied into the alt and title tags for the image file itself, which Google considers important. If you don't know what alt or title tags are there was a good thread on that in here recently.
And regarding image metadata, I do fill that out, but it seems either FAA strips it out or Google isn't reading it, because I do have literal descriptions and keywords filled in before I upload to FAA.
Thanks for the info again. Bottom line is that the keywords we invest so much time in, only have a value, when buyers come to FAA and search there, vs searching on Google and then, not seeing those keywords show up. Is this something that FAA can "fix"? Seems important....
Tom,
Would another web site started, that would link back to our FAA/Pixels, with maybe just a small percentage of images, benefit us artists, in Google search results? In my case with the cars I have, maybe 2-3,000 and in the new web site, maybe 200-300 images and then links back to the images or "collections", would that work? I certainly don't want to duplicate ALL my images to a new web site.....
meta name="keywords" content="cool blue cat, don northup, kitten,eyes,cat,pets,kitty,surrealism,pet,feline,blue,beautiful,surreal,house,expressionism,mammal,animals,cute,fur,adorable,domestic,face,animal,striped,tabby,fluffy,beauty,pussy,playful,pretty,attractive,curious,happy,portrait,abstract,don northup,digital art pros,cat art,closeup,faces
Our AW meta description can/is used by google but the description listed appears to be for the collection and not the image.
meta name="description" content="Faces of the Cat: I love cats! These amazing surreal abstract cats and kittens were raised, photographed, and digitally painted by myself. The artwork...
On FAA no metatags are listed and the meta description is not our description or our collection description. It is the image title, the4 upload date, and basically a generic statement from FAA.
meta name="description" content="Cool Blue Cat is a piece of digital artwork by Don Northup which was uploaded on July 13th, 2019. The digital art may be purchased as wall art, home decor, apparel, phone cases, greeting cards, and more. All products are produced on-demand and shipped worldwide within 2 - 3 business days.
Google can index the page with all of the content listed on the page that it can see, but as I mentioned above its likely (in some cases) Google will not rank or possibly even index all of the basically identical content across the many different sites. Sean is using canonical tags and no-indexing that also affects what stuff is ranked and what stuff can be indexed. Google may not index everything due to duplicate and/or copied content.
I think some of you may be chasing your tails here and only Sean can tell us his SEO strategy and the techniques he uses to keep FAA content ranked highly across the board and how he attempts to avoid Google's copied and/or duplicate content penalties. Google is not the only search engine but as we know it is the largest by far.
Yes, it is the titles that appear to be one of the biggest ranking factors on FAA.
SEO is a fine art in itself and we can only guess as to what is going on. Yes, I have run some SEO tests with SEO software on our AW vs Pixels vs FAA and that story has been told on previous threads by several of us.
Yes, ranking another website that links to your AW stuff can be a good way to get more traction with Google.
Considering all of the factors of SEO and Google itself, Sean's ultimate SEO goals for FAA, the site coding I talked about above, and replicating content across multiple sites --> Good Luck With That.
Top that off with the AWs are notoriously bad for SEO and ranking without external help (good backlinks etc.)...
For instance --> here is one of my Wordpress sites with only a couple hundred images and minimal if any descriptions, and basically zero backlinks from outside the FAA forum (FAA links are no-follow anyway) and with zero promotion.
About 381 results (0.26 seconds)
Here is my AW with more than 3000 images and 10,000+ products.
It's a sad SEO story on the AW, no other way to put it.
People have been asking Sean to allow us to edit the alt and title tags for a long time but it hasn't happened yet. It could be of benefit if we were allowed the ability to edit the tags. That's not the only thing that could help, but at least it's something. Would it be great if Google indexed anything and everything - of course it would but that is going to be difficult with all of the replicated content and the replicated metadata can't be helping things a whole lot either, at least as far as each individual artists is concerned.
Let me get my step ladder, most of what you said, is over my head! LOL!
So, are you suggesting that your Wordpress site is roughly getting 3 times the "hits" as is the AW? With a 10th of the images?
And is this something that SEAN has some control over? If so, WHY isn't this being "fixed"? What benefit could it be to Sean, to NOT HAVE MORE GOOGLE EYES on the Prize?
I am saying that particular Wordpress site has probably 60,000 or less (might be way less, that's a very rough number) total pages if you count all of the AW product pages, 2800 or so fewer images, but yet it has 263 more pages indexed than the AW. (According to Google site search)
On top of that, it has tons of the images available in image search (if not all of them, I didn't count them) and the AW only has a tiny fraction of the 3000+ images indexed.
If you want better control over SEO then use your own site where you have full control of everything.
Google uses a couple of hundred ranking factors and we don't know all of the answers and that is why SEO experts get paid the big bucks.
Talk to those people that have great art but are new to FAA and/or have not sold much here about the *unfair advantage* that some of the old-timers have in the internal FAA site search.
SEO and the what, where, and when you will be indexed, and where you will be ranked is not cut and dried...especially on a site like this. You don't control the code, the crawlers, the penalty, or the algorithms. You barely have any control here at all. Maybe the old adage --> you get what you pay for applies.
Below are some snippets of an article you might want to read. Some of this Google Indexing stuff may be due to the luck of the crawl...obviously, it's no conspiracy against individual artists as all of the pages are identical other than the content you add to the page. I talked about some of the other factors I did not snip above.
5. Internal Duplicates
Internal content duplication is a risk to any SEO efforts. Internal duplicate content may or may not keep your pages out of Google’s index, but large ratios of internal duplicate content on your pages will likely keep them from ranking well. If you have a particular page that has a large amount of similar content with another page on your website, it’s possible that this could be the reason that your page is either not indexed in Google or simply not ranking well.
Google clearly states here that websites should minimize similar content. It’s possible that pages on your site with very similar content could still rank to some degree, however, pages with exactly the same content will likely be filtered out of Google’s immediate search results. They may be omitted from search results under a notice such as the following.
6. External Duplicates
External duplicate content is what you might expect…content duplicated with other websites. Large ratios of duplicate content are a sure sign of low quality to Google, and should be avoided at all costs. No matter whether your website is a lead generation marketing site, E-Commerce store, online publishing platform, or hobbyist blog…the same rules apply.
It's only irrelevant to you because you don't seem to understand search algorithms, SEO, indexing, and ranking. The stuff I have posted is relevant, and nobody is trying to derail your threads with self-aggrandizing posts. I am no SEO expert by any means, but I have in the past ranked a single image site of mine that was getting 450,000 real page views a day at its peak. Seriously, you need to get over yourself.
Then are you suggesting that our FAA site and our Pixel site fall under this issue:
"6. External Duplicates
External duplicate content is what you might expect…content duplicated with other websites. Large ratios of duplicate content are a sure sign of low quality to Google, and should be avoided at all costs. No matter whether your website is a lead generation marketing site, E-Commerce store, online publishing platform, or hobbyist blog…the same rules apply."
If so, why isn't every artist here also complaining about the decrease in inviews/sales? I would think it's across the board kinda thing.....
