So I have an older but current Backlight 5 site which when I create an XML Sitemap at xml-sitemaps.com I get what I would expect, just over 500 pages.
I have a new sub-domain on the same site but when I create the XML Sitemap all I get is the album set and albums. It never goes down to see any of the images. Each album has direct links to the other albums and they are also available in the menu. Any ideas?
Have you read our blog post on it?
https://blog.theturninggate.net/2020/12/06/creating-a-sitemap-for-backlight/
Yes I did, that’s where I got the xml-sitemaps.com from. I ran it for the site and it only picked up the albums and album sets, not any individual images, so it returned only 9 pages although there are 104 images on the site. I entered individual information on all of the images with unique names etc specifically for SEO. The site will never be found with only 9 pages on a sitemap.
Can you share a link to your site, please?
There currently also a hidden (no current link) album set that I had linked to see if an “album set” at the top level would help but it didn’t add any additional links other than duplicating the albums already at the top level.
The main site landwehrle.com has over 500 links in it that show on xml-sitemaps. Could it be that it’s not searching because it’s a sub-domain?
SEO is hard, and there are no easy solutions. Generally, it’s really all about the quality of the written content and internal linking (along with getting other quality sites to link to your pages). That’s how search engines rank the page to be found in a search.
Many confuse SEO with the concept of indexing. SEO’s intent is to rank high in a search. Indexing it just trying to be included in the search database. To be clear, you can’t be ranked without being indexed, but if a page doesn’t rank high enough Google doesn’t index it. Many think of SEO too simply as if it were “Find” in a document. SEO is really about ranking, which is much more than being indexed.
The best thing that will provide the most SEO “juice” is to give pages well-written content. A page with no content isn’t going to rank (and may not be indexed). I wouldn’t bother written a lot of content for ever page, but the main landing page for a portfolio should have a well-written description. And the content should be more than just a few words. High-ranking pages have about 2,000 words! Writting good SEO content is a skill (I have a book that covers this topic and it’s over 1,000 pages).
On to a few things I found while looking at your two sites.
I couldn’t find your sitemap, nor your robots.txt that would point to your sitemap. Not sure if you removed them or what’s going on there. Maybe your still in the process of building them?
Out of curiosity, I ran landwehrle.com through some site validation tools and they were finding errors. Such errors that will impact your SEO, defeating the intent of adding a sitemap.
First I would fix the errors reported here:
Then look at these errors, which can also negatively impact SEO:
Google can crawl a site even without a sitemap. It relies more on the site structure than the sitemap. If the site’s structure isn’t good, then adding a sitemap will not improve the SEO.
The site also has a sub-sub domain: www.workshops.landwehrle.com where you only need workshops.landwehrle.com. Changing that could impact SEO. It depends on how much SEO “juice” the site has. There are ways to migrate the site and inherit the SEO juice.
Not sure you should have a sub-domain, as it’s (generally) considered an entirely separate site. So you’ll have both sites competing for the SEO you might be trying to gain on one (or the other?). Sub-directories are often better (e.g. landwehrle.com/workshops). That said, depending on how long ago the workshop site was setup it might be better to continue with that. Just realize they are (generally) two separate sites, and need to be managed as such. Site maps on one cannot include pages on the other.
At www.workshops.landwehrle.com I crawled and found 338 in total with 334 linking to internal pages. If there are more, then look at your site structure for not having links to the missing pages. There were 212 images.
At landwehrle.com I found 803 pages and 1,537 images.
The image file names should be descriptive rather than “DL171234-567-single”. That helps with SEO, and the page would contain alt-text linking to the image file to help search engines index the images for search.
On the page landwehrle.com/home/galleries/ you have a link to landwehrle.com/home/galleries which is a redirect (due to the missing end slash). I point this one out as you want that link to be ranked.
Page titles should be less than 60 characters. You have some that are too long, such as “Overlooking a valley forest of pine trees with snow covered Mt. Rainier in the distance during late afternoon on a blue sky day in Mt. Rainier National Park. - Don Landwehrle Photography”. Titles should be short, while you can use the above as the description (but one is missing from the page). A meta-description can be helpful, but that’s just a hint to search engines. Not sure here but this might be something that Backlight is creating.
Due to the long title a search engine will not see your business name.
Looks like you haven’t finished your contact page. It’s published with Lorem ipsum content.
Contact - Landwehrle Photography Workshops. Also on that page “Portfilio” is misspelled. Another SEO tip, for the name of that link it would be better to use “Don Landwehrle Photography” or “Don Landwehrle Portfolio”
On the home page https://www.workshops.landwehrle.com/ it links to a pricing page that is a 404.
I’m not familiar with script from xml-sitemaps.com, but I have built many web sites.
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Wow! Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to write all of that information, unbelievable!!!
The original site, landwehrle.com was for when I was doing a lot of commercial work to send someone to so they could see my photography. It really was not about getting SEO up there so I was not concerned with naming every image.
The new site is a different matter so that is why I’m interested in getting SEO working. As far as the price page, yea I know it’s not going anywhere yet. I had a price page set, reworked the site and lost the page. I need to go investigate again on a good pricing strategy.
Neither site has an XML map so that’s why you didn’t find one. I used xml-sitemaps to have it build one, but like I said it only came up with a few main pages so wondering if the problem is that site builder or the site itself?
As far as the Titles being too long. Yea those were done for a stock photo agencies that uses a Title instead of Caption. My understanding now is Titles are suppose to be something like “Sunset-Sidestep-Canyon-Utah”
So you were able to crawl the websites and find every page, but how do I build a xml sitemap that shows all of the pages you were able to crawl?
Thanks for all the help! I’ve corrected a bunch of things but others will take a little bit of time.
@DonLand I fed your site address into the XML Sitemaps homepage, and it generated a sitemap including 112 files. That’s using the address https://www.workshops.landwehrle.com/ .
The site map generator should be able to crawl your site just fine then. If you’re getting different results from the script, I recommend delving into your settings to ensure things are configured properly.
Hey Matthew, thanks for the help. Funny thing going on here. Before it didn’t pick up any of the photo pages whereas now it does. There are actually 2 copies of the same site. The first one I did had no album set, every album is in the “top level sets directory”, and this is the one the xml-sitemap picked up. The hidden duplicate is in a “top level sets directory” “album sets”, and xml-sitemap never picked this one up, kind of as I would expect since there are no links to it. I’ll create and update the site map for google tomorrow.
thanks for the help!
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