A lot has been written about SmugMug SEO. I like SmugMug and will continue to use them. They are a great deal for image delivery. They are not trying to be anything else. They are never going to be your perfect place for each of your images to get correctly indexed by Google. You will get a few images indexed. They are a great service and will continue to be. I used them for years as a working professional to deliver images to clients. They are perfect for what they say they are. SmugMug SEO is fine for what SmugMug says they do.
Google does not index every page and every image of every site. Period. End of story. No amount of SmugMug SEO will fix this. But, if you want to optimize coverage by Google, and want to control the meta tags, filenames and whatnot, then build and host your own site. No image hosting platform will allow you complete control of this. There are many software packages online and off where you can build each page of your site with perfect SEO page titles, meta names, image filenames and all the other necessary ingredients. I did this and I am seeing good results so far. I hand-coded my own site to link back to my SmugMug site. It onIy exists to index my images. I don't have to handwrite every page. I just write server side code to produce each page for each image on the fly according to my own specifications. My pages are very simple by choice. It was not meant to be a beautiful site. No extra fluff. It works great on mobile devices, which Google prefers.
I once had over a 1000 images online for many years. I took a leap of faith and deleted all of them. I then removed them from Google using Google's tools. I then went back through my entire image catalog and reposted every image that I wanted reposted. The benefit of doing this was to properly title, caption, keyword and write metadata for each and every image accurately and correctly. It was fun to revisit old images and re-edit raw files. I laughed at myself sometimes when I saw how I edited something 20 years ago.
Give SmugMug a break, they are awesome. SmugMug SEO is a bit of an unfair witch hunt. If you can do better, then do it. I did.
I met Leonard Knight several times a few years before his death in 2014. He allowed me to shoot a few portraits of him. He struck me as a generous and caring individual. All he wanted to do was show me his mountain and let me know that Jesus loved me. If you have never been to Salvation Mountain, then I encourage you to visit. It is amazing what this man built. I don’t know what kind of condition it is in today. Hopefully someone is keeping it in good shape.
| Tag Name | Data |
|---|---|
| Title | Leonard Knight Salvation Mountain |
| Keywords | Leonard Knight, niland, salton sea, salvation mountain, slab city |
| Copyright | ©ExpertPhoto.com All Rights Reserved |
| Artist | ExpertPhoto.com |
| Make | Canon |
| Camera Model Name | Canon EOS 5D Mark II |
| Lens Model | EF50mm f/1.4 USM |
| Focal Length | 50.00mm |
| Shutter Speed Value | 1/1600 second |
| Aperture Value | 4.00 |
| ISO | 100 |
| Date/Time Original | Wednesday December 30, 2009 02:08pm |
| City | Calipatria |
| State | California |
| Country | United States |
| Location | Salvation Mountain |
| GPS Altitude | 2 meters (6.6 feet) above sea level |
| GPS Latitude | 33.25422 |
| GPS Longitude | -115.47336 |
| Map | Google Map Link |