Shouldn't Google searchs find pictures posted here by keywords?

Just as a test, I did a Google search for several of my pictures and could not find any of them. I even searched for them by the exact keywords that I used in my portolio but still no luck. Is a Google search supposed to find our photographs? Thanks.

Tom, you can write directives for a website which will deny search engine bots from indexing your webpage, thus pulling it out of the search indices you can search through on google.com I am guessing NPN has done the same thing - it makes sense actually. For a site that is actually a forum with constant posting of photographs and comments by lots of people, indexing such a website would not only be a mind-boggling but also a futile exercise, not to mention the increase in traffic (the search engines learn how often your site changes to decided whether to visit more frequently or not).

Hope that helps.
Ashutosh

Thanks, Ashutosh. I don't know anything about the technicalities involved but what you say sounds like it makes sense. However, before I joined NPN, I thought I read that search engine would bring people to member's images and that that was one of the benefits of joining. I probably just misuderstood what I read. No big deal. But if anyone knows the answer to my question for sure, I would like to hear what you have to say.

Thanks again, Ashutosh.

Tom,

I think (hope) that the Portfolios that some of members have might be indexed by search engines. The portfolios are more static than the imges in the forums.

Frank

Tom,
This might help you and others understand a couple of things about the NEW WAY the major search engines work. Google and Yahoo and similar engines work by having their crawler scan your pages to look for relevant keywords. Many times a key word is found in the text on the site, not one that has been put in on purpose as a keyword for searches. Keywords listed on the NPN Portfolios will most likley never be found by a search engine due to the fact that these words are hidden within a site and the crawler will never locate them in the orginal scan. Two things get sites located now. One is the title phrase of the site and the other is the description phrase of the site. Keywords play very little in a site's ranking on search engines now and to be at the top you have to pay to get ranked. The images you see on a Google search are simply found because at some point the web crawler picked up on a title of that image on a site. There are thousands of images you will never see because the crawler does not know they exist. Visitors are not sent to the portfolios on this site because they select an image name, they are directed here because they searched for nature photos. The good part is that if someone comes here it is because they are looking for what we have on this site. They know what it is all about before they click on it. Once they arrive they can search as much as they wish.

I only know this stuff because I design and program web sites as part of my living and have had good success getting ranked on Google. It is hard and often takes weeks of refining and having them crawl it again. I hope this helped without getting to technical about it.
---- Michael

Michael,
That explains it perfectly and even I can understand it the way you explained it.

Thanks for taking the time to explain that so well.

Hey people with portfolios

Search keyword lightning

There are two 'n's in this word people.

The keyword is not 'lighting'. One would assume 'lighting' is part of any photograph. Those of us who face almost certain death to take shots of [b[LIGHTNING[/b] would appreciate your cooperation.

example for those unfamiliar with the english language:
http://www.photoportfolios.net/portfolio/pf.cgi?a=vp&pr=21779&b=up&st=1&la=38&ph=14&sid=10990&pi=DMILLER&u=10990

Just hijacking the thread.

I was pointing out that some keywords are messed up because people have been careless/inaccurate when building their portfolio.

Even with exposing the portfolios and photos to goggle, the careless assignment of keywords make finding a particular photo difficult.

As I said up front, search the keyword lightning with the portfolio software and see what you get.

I believe keywords are a chosen by check boxes. So it's not a spelling mistake.

People may pay, but that doesn't give them the right to make a specialized category worthless through carelessness.

I must have surfed to dpreview by mistake. It sure looks like NPN.