Why has my website, which showed up three months ago, no longers shows
up when you type "alan copeland"? Is it a matter of hits? To find any
part of it I go to advanced and then find two "segments" of it.
Enlighten me.

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Request for Question Clarification by serenata-ga on 09 Feb 2004 22:49 PST

Hello Loki1018 ~

In order to answer this question, we need the URL of your site.

Without it, we can only surmise.

Thanks,
Serenata

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Clarification of Question by loki1018-ga on 10 Feb 2004 14:14 PST

Ooops. Sorry about that. URL is alancopeland.net

Dear Loki, 

The site, first of all, is beautiful! 

I would refer to what my colleagues have written as well as to other
improvements to the site. Before that, let me just make suer that you
know that Google Answer Researchers, such as me and my colleagues, are
not Google employees. What I write here is my own researched opinion
and not an official Google position.

In order to understand what's wrong, you have to understand a little
how Google works. Google crawls through sites and through links these
sites have to other sites. Basically, listing and ranking are done
using a complex algorithm, which is based on the quality and quantity
of sites linking to that specific site, among other factors.

Links to your sites are therefore essential in your ranking and
listing, and your site lacks those.

How to improve the linking level to your site? There are several ways.
The first, is to be listed in professional directories that are
listing photography related sites:

Many directories are listed under Google Directory's category: 
<http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Photography/Resources/Directories/?il=1>

Yahoo! Directory offers several categories, among them: 
Photojournalists' online exhibitions 
<http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photojournalism/Photojournalists/Personal_Exhibits/>
Photojournalism
<http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photojournalism/> 
Photographers 
<http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Visual_Arts/Photography/Photographers/Personal_Exhibits/>

(Please note that Yahoo! directory has two ways to be listed - one
free and one isn't).

Art and Photography
<http://art-and-photography.com/> 
Their term is simple and common to many sites: we'll list you, just
link back to us. I recommend having a links category somewhere in your
site, where you could link to all of that.

Photography Directory 
www.photoclicks.net/ 

Since you have also many celebrities and 1960s themes there (and I
also saw that you used that in your keywords), being listed in
speciality directories for this is also a good idea.

Another way to get links, is to write rich content, that others would
quote in their site. For example, to write an article, in each
section, about your experiences photographing this kind of works,
before the "train" with the works starts running. This could also
contain internal links. In general, internal links help your site to
be crawled all over.

For example: "In 1970, I was asked to picture the Black Panthers, at
their Headquarters, {LINK to that picture} [...]".

You could also ask people you know - who have their own website - to
link their website to yours.

There are several other methods, that could help: 
- Including your site's URL in all your signatures in emails and
discussion group comments;
- Advertising your site (such as in Google AdWords,
<https://adwords.google.com/select/>

Frankly, I believe that since your site is currently not commercial
(though I wish I had the resources to have one of those beautiful
photographs!), there is no point in spending too much money on
advertising.

Linking is not the only thing that matters. Content was mentioned
before, and there are tasteful ways to have a well designed site, with
text content that would be crawled.

Your keywords/metatags are also important. From what I see right now,
your keywords are: [photography, Alan Copeland, 60's, lifestyles, hip,
Black Panthers]. I wish that was enough! You should add many more
keywords, that would fit the terms people are looking for, when they
are looking for a site like yours:
- photographer, photjournalist, photojournalism (and so on in the
photography related terms)
- All of the artists featured - and if it is people who are also part
of a band/movement - the name of that band is in order.
- Names of the places. 

Please remember, that because of your name, which is identical with
another famous individual (a composer), you have to have as many
keywords as possible, to get noticed.

There are also many tips on what NOT to do. 

Basically, don't try to "cheat" or spam Google, by using Search Engine
Optimisers (you might have received junk mail about these programmes,
that offer Google Ranking).

You could read Google's own Webmasters instructions on: 
://www.google.com/webmasters/

I hope this helped. Please contact me if you need any further
clarification on this answer before you rate it.

Hi Alan,

This is only a guess, hence the comment. 

This is what I think has happened:

Current situation
-----------------
Your home page has not text. No other site is linking to yours.
Rightly or wrongly Google has determined that your site isn't very
important, and although it has indexed it, your site comes in near the
bottom of search results.

Previously
----------
Another site was linking to yours. We know this by looking at Google's
cache of your site, after a search for "Alan Copeland Photography:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:VHQikYrURNcJ:www.alancopeland.net/+%22alan+copeland+photography%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

It says: "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: alan
copeland photography"

...but I can't find such a link anywhere. 

It could appear somewhere within your site, but I quit looking for it
because I got too annoyed by the mouseover redirects your site
employs. Having pages change just because your mouse pointer moves
over them is quite ridiculous, and something I have never seen before
(I've been surfing since 1996). Do your visitors a favour and get rid
of them.


robertskelton-ga
Google Answers Researcher

OK. Redesign time. If I add an index with text describing the photos
that may help. The mouse overs I can correct, just found them fine for
me but not for the general surfing public I guess. And links, but I
have to learn how to do that.Back to the drawing board. Thanks.

Alan,

Rob is right. Remember that search engine spiders can not read
*pictures* of text; they can only read text. I wouldn't just add an
index; I'd recommend that you also replace the pictures of red Courier
typeface with actual red Courier typeface text. You should also
replace the picture of your URL name with the actual text in a nice
red font, script style if you choose to keep it that way.

You have a fair bit of content on your subpages, but the Googlebot
visits your site's main page, sees that it is essentially blank, and
doesn't bother spidering any further. That's why it's so important to
make sure that you have a decent amount of text content on your main
page; you will want to make sure that "photojournalist", your name,
and your URL appear at least twice in the text on your main page
(Google no longer uses metatags for indexing), and you may want to
make sure that the words "blog" "diary" "weblog" and "journal" appear
at least once on the main page. That way someone looking for you by
name, or for the blog/diary/weblog/journal of a photojournalist,
should be able to find you.

Best wishes,

aceresearcher

Hi, 

A robots.txt, and a site map would go a long way. Link to your site
map on the front page someplace, and keep the file on the top
directory level (same level as your index.html page).

Personally (we were just discussing your sight in the researcher cyber
coffee room) I like the mouse over page changers. Rob is right that
they probably shouldn?t be on your front page. Since they are
javascript links, the bots may not be following them well.

But on the design level, the reason for not having them on the front
page is that visitor?s aren?t expecting it, and most will probably
feel that something is wrong with their browser. On the inside pages
where you have the thumb of the front, up in the top left handside, ?
to me that is a cool effect. The first time it is a bit odd, but after
than I kind of liked it.

The one with your image after the bio though, again, it is not enough
warning or ?clue? that this is intentional, so again, it is more of a
?bother? or annoyance, than something that might be cool, or tricky.

It is a good effect, and a creative one, but placement and design are
important when you throw cool and creative at the general public. The
public loves the rabbit from the hat, but burns the witch with the new
love potion.

You might want to optimize the images in there as well, some take a
great deal of time to load, which is unfortunate, because they are
great images.

Already mentioned is the text attribute. Your images are fantastic,
but of very little interest to search engine bots, not just google,
but any. Perhaps a poetic paragraph or two, in a well laided out CSS
format would help with this.

Check out www.csszengarden.com for a few ideas along those lines. 

webadept-ga