I'm shocked about the list of the keywords of this image:
http://us.fotolia.com/id/49296327
and also about the other keywords from this portfolio...
I remember, 1-2 years ago, almost all the agencies became very upset on keyword spamming... Except FL?

I like the fact he/she is selling the EL for the same price as the biggest size

The agencies made a noise about keywording, but ignorance and spamming goes on at all of them nevertheless.

Ok, we all make mistakes when keywording. In the worst case, let's say 6-8 keywords remain from a previous image... And this for several images...
But it's too much to include mainly unrelated keywords... And for EVERY image in the portfolio...

As long as keyword spamming goes 'unpunished', it remains profitable in the mind (and maybe in sales) of the offender.
Can't find 'em now but there have been images at FT (from Japanese contributors) that contained 200 keywords whereas there's supposed to be a limit of 50.

You Know What Bothers Me? Sold today EL 4200 x 2800 for 2.5$. I mean who cares about FT and their keywords.

With every submission to FT you have to adjust your EL price. FT sets it at 10 as standard but you have to manually change it for every image submitted to avoid selling an EL for $2.50 to you.
I set all of mine to $70 which means I get 25% on a sale.........but then again, I never sell EL's at FT.

How do you manage to set yours to $70? Mine has a cap at $20 

That would explain it.....

There is outragous spam everywhere - sites allow too many keywords

Easter apple background bag beauty cheese cooking countryside cube cuisine dinner dish drink egg eggs fatty flour fruits garlic greasy health heap hole home isolated lettuce long market meat mess milk mustard pasta restaurant sandwich shop shopping smoked spring straw summer tomato vegetables water wet white wine

should be:

Easter cooking cuisine egg eggs fatty health

(and even these)

It's also odd that they are missing some of the obvious words like Yolk, Shell, Cracked, Close Up, Brown, Yellow.

Quote from: luissantos84 on February 16, 2013, 17:37

Easter apple background bag beauty cheese cooking countryside cube cuisine dinner dish drink egg eggs fatty flour fruits garlic greasy health heap hole home isolated lettuce long market meat mess milk mustard pasta restaurant sandwich shop shopping smoked spring straw summer tomato vegetables water wet white wine

should be:

Easter cooking cuisine egg eggs fatty health

(and even these)

I wouldn't use Easter, cooking, cuising, fatty or probably health.
OTOH, I have no idea what Fotolia's keywording standards are: maybe they're very loose.

sure I was looking for the less bad

about agencies being loose, all beside iStock, sometimes CanStockPhoto one or two

Quote from: luissantos84 on February 16, 2013, 17:37

Easter apple background bag beauty cheese cooking countryside cube cuisine dinner dish drink egg eggs fatty flour fruits garlic greasy health heap hole home isolated lettuce long market meat mess milk mustard pasta restaurant sandwich shop shopping smoked spring straw summer tomato vegetables water wet white wine

should be:

Easter cooking cuisine egg eggs fatty health

(and even these)

I wouldn't use Easter, cooking, cuising, fatty or probably health.
OTOH, I have no idea what Fotolia's keywording standards are: maybe they're very loose.

Let me complete the list of the keywords and comments (just to be academic):
egg, eggs, whole, broken, yolk, yellow, half, raw, ...
I would not include:
- easter. Who want to find egg (for any reason) will type 'egg' or 'eggs'. Question is, it's good to show some ordinary, raw eggs when searching 'easter'?
- cooking, cuisine: there's no cooking on the image, and also eggs are not necessarily connected to cooking! No kitchen also
- health. It depends on the person, for some folks, eggs are really not healthy
- fat, fatty. Does not relate to eggs

Quote from: OM on February 16, 2013, 20:06

As long as keyword spamming goes 'unpunished', it remains profitable in the mind (and maybe in sales) of the offender.

For sure, I agree (joking, NOT cynical). It's highly profitable for the contributor alone, and also, if others does not spam - IMHO.
The problem arises when
- other contributor's images are placed far from the first pages due to spamming
- buyers who really want to find something and have no option 'don't show this image anymore' option, see the same image when searching different terms...

I'm a buyer sometimes and I'm struggling to filter out some aggressively upcoming images I just don't want to see anymore...

A strict keyword policy is very good for an agency, it helps a lot the buyers to find exactly what they want, not just browse the huge mess again and again...
I think, the loose keyword policy and the slow page loads is responsible for the huge earnings drop at FL...

I agree absolutely about spamming making life hell for the buyer. I am also an occasional buyer as well as contributor and the FT search is just horrendous because of spamming and other really annoying quirks.
One example was a search for golf clubs. Depending on my search entry, 'golfclub', 'golfclubs', 'golf club' or 'golf clubs', I got 4 completely different results; varying from ~70 results for the incorrectly spelled 'golfclubs' plural to 16,000 for the correctly spelled 'golf club' which of course the search enters as 2 separate words. Whilst on the subject of golf enter the word 'tee' and you get a load of images of 'tea' because some (presumably German-speaking contributors) have entered 'tee' when they mean 'tea'. Some months ago I entered 'tee' and actually got images of 'tea' with only 'tea' in the keywords. That suggested to me that even their algorithm was confused by the various languages! That latter problem does, however, seem to have been fixed since then.

Perhaps FT doesn't realise that silly search and allowing excessive keyword spamming will eventually drive customers away.

Most spam produce the automatic translation function on Fotolia  (and at other agencies as well). As a native German speaker, I write my keywords on Fotolia in German - sometimes the translator generates absolute nonsense.