Shirley Bell Designs has hundreds of beautiful images. And Google Image search isn’t indexing them. Why not? Apparently it doesn’t like dynamically generated pages (ie with URL parameters and the like) in between the crawler and the image. No problem - I created this simple image page listing every one of Shirley’s paintings with a clear title, link to a neatly formatted image and a link to the original jpg (example: black lab). Google re-crawled the site, checked this page out (it is in the sitemap) and then decided not to index it. Why? Bizarre. Guess I’ll have to dig deeper.
This is a shame though. I imagine many gallery sites are dynamic such as this one, and if Google can’t index them it is missing out on many many images on the web. I know I use Google Image search all the time for clip-art, etc. and yet I never realized it wasn’t doing a good job on the indexing side.
March 6th, 2008
Allow me to (re)introduce Shirley Bell Designs! Shirley is a longtime neighbor and family friend, and it’s been my pleasure to help appropriately showcase her beautiful artwork online. New site features include an improved image gallery, better information about the artist, and the ability to purchase her artwork online. We’re also doing some tentative marketing, to increase organic search results as well as generate paid search leads. This is actually a very interesting process - I recommend everyone try it for something.
I chose PayPal for a payment solution. The downside is the shopping cart isn’t perfectly integrated, and the prices are slightly higher than Google Checkout’s, however unlike Checkout PayPal allows purchasing without PayPal accounts, which significantly increases the number of potential customers.
My favorite bit is the “we believe ” section. A sample: “we believe in keeping our designs simple and clean, leaving room for the card giver to add a message the artwork may reflect.”
March 5th, 2008
