Agency Based Discussion > Alamy.com
Alamy "discoverablity" revisited
ShadySue:
--- Quote from: Mantis on August 02, 2020, 08:42 ---
--- Quote from: mj007 on August 01, 2020, 17:44 ---It is clearly worth the time to do the super words. I just made a $200 sell Friday. I wish I could make that everyday, but I do get 2-5 sells a month on Alamy. Very fair stock site...
--- End quote ---
So you are basing this one single data point....a $200 sale... on the value of discoverability keywords?
--- End quote ---
I think mj was meaning super tags. But certainly one sale doesn't prove that supertags made any difference.
stockastic:
Since I haven't looked at Alamy in years I knew nothing about their current image manager. So I just watched their short video explaining it. I noticed that every image in the example account showed "poor discoverability" and the narrator never addressed that or said a word about what it meant.
There was a single vague statement about how Supertags are prioritized, or something like that.
I then found another video on YouTube about "how to increase your Alamy discoverablity" and it basically said you just stuff keywords until you get to 50, and showed an example of how doing this finally gave you that green Discoverability indication.
Seriously, this is what they want? Just more keyword spamming?
ShadySue:
--- Quote from: stockastic on August 02, 2020, 14:55 ---Since I haven't looked at Alamy in years I knew nothing about their current image manager. So I just watched their short video explaining it. I noticed that every image in the example account showed "poor discoverability" and the narrator never addressed that or said a word about what it meant.
There was a single vague statement about how Supertags are prioritized, or something like that.
I then found another video on YouTube about "how to increase your Alamy discoverablity" and it basically said you just stuff keywords until you get to 50, and showed an example of how doing this finally gave you that green Discoverability indication.
Seriously, this is what they want? Just more keyword spamming?
--- End quote ---
To be fair, that other video isn't an official Alamy video.
But yes, the system is pretty insane and leads the easily-led to spam keywords, which means you might be more 'discoverable' on marginal or irrelevant words, which must annoy buyers. But as their search can and does combine any word in the keyword or caption with any other word in the keyword or caption to make an irrelevant keyword phrase, spamming is just adding more annoyance. Actually, at this moment, one of my 'test searches' (Leonard Cohen) for this is looking pretty clean (at other times, images with Leonard X and Z Cohen have featured high up in the mix), though another (Blue Whale) has lots of other whales with blue sea, blue sky in the mix on the first page (not necessarily misidentifications).
stockastic:
So what about Supertags? Do they matter, or is this just more hoo-ha that was hot for a few months and then forgotten?
ShadySue:
--- Quote from: stockastic on August 02, 2020, 16:00 ---So what about Supertags? Do they matter, or is this just more hoo-ha that was hot for a few months and then faded away?
--- End quote ---
Actually, it wasn't.
At the beginning, there was some 'hitch' which meant supertags counted LOWER than tags. I believe that got fixed. Like I said above, captions are still ranking higher than tags, can't vouch for supertags, as often the supertags will still be in the caption. For a long time in two test searches (unfortunately I can't remember the searches) captions counted higher than supertags, which was provable as some old files somehow had captions but no tags at all, and they were higher in the search than files with supertags. Currently (at least in my limited search tests) captions rank higher than tags.
You'd have to do your own tests as to whether supertags rank higher than tags. For example if you have two sister files, e.g. a horizontal and a vertical, look and see where they rank in search, then do a supertag on one only, wait a couple of days, and see if it has risen for that word (and the unaltered one hasn't).
Then as a cross check, take another two sisters, select one supertag on one, and on the other, add or subtract a tag to see whether the rise was a result of you having 'done something' with the file rather than the actual supertag.
Whatever, their system could change next week, month or year, so ... It depends whether you have a few hours or more to spend on this, which depends how big your port is there. I did it over several days, a couple of hours at a time, on dark, wet evenings when there was nothing more pressing to be done.
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