Quote from: Void on February 21, 2007, 16:28
if i remember correctly, internal links don't mean jack....if you have tons of pages on your site and links back and forth among them all, that doesnt do anything with rankings....

as far as i know the real links that matter are the external ones, like if the sites your pictures were on linked to your personal site, that would help raise the ranking of your personal site.....
i could be wrong....but then maybe not....

They don't count as heavily, but I was able to bump my site to a very high spot (#2 worldwide) for a very particular search phrase by linking to it from other pages (site content). True, nothing's better than having a link to it from elsewhere, but any links help. Then again Google and its mysterious algorithms keep many great minds at bay...

Tyler is the one who reads the whole thing. I clipped part of the message for you guys in the original post. Yeah, I hear some of you. I'm ALL travel stock. I don't like doing anything else. I will if I have to (mostly for money) or if I have a brilliant stock concept (very few of those) because stock photography in its conceptual lack of soul just doesn't move me. What does is money.

And yeah, travel stock sells great on some sites. I do great with it on Dreamstime: *, just about 5 minutes ago I sold yet another Extended License there with this shot:


It's funny too because I just went through a whole Q&A session at Fotolia because they stopped accepting (maybe they never were and I just didn't notice) panoramic pictures.

And to epixx: I agree. Travel shots make a bulk of my sales everywhere including StockXpert and a good bulk providing for a payout every month for half a year now. It's just a pity that I can't seem to get anymore travel shots in and if so, it is with a great difficulty...

Here is a non-geek translation guys:

The fact that the page itself has comments has no bearing for Google. What helps is that every time a photographer comments on a picture, the link to that page with a photo is written onto another page. So if 10 of you comment on my picture, suddenly that page has 10 links linking to it, therefore increasing its page ranking.

So yup. Okay I'm in for some ratings too.

Quote from: bryan_luckyoliver on February 02, 2007, 05:18
And yes, you have some parts correct about Google, but 'on page' content is only one part of how Google works.  Google has over 100 variables they play with in determining the value of a web page.  One of the largest factors is PageRank.  Think of the web as a series of connected pages- Google tries to make sense of this mess through links.

I don't want to go into specifics of what we're doing, but I can assure you that Leaf's page didn't get higher simply because of the 'on-page' content-it has just as much to do with who and how many people linked to his page. I've been doing this for ten years, increased many businesses revenues online and have helped build ClickTracks, an award winning web analytics software.

Well Bryan,
   one thing I'll give you guys is that at least you answer all the questions that we post and don't keep us in the dark. We're just getting a bit antsy because it has been quite a long time now. Although (and you can take it as a compliment) you and LO remind me a bit of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com. He was sounding the horn a lot and doing a lot of PR while Amazon.com was languishing in the dumps. And then suddenly it sprung up to become world's number 1 internet retailer.
   In the meantime as I mentioned few times before: I'll keep on holding my fingers crossed and keep on uploading. The upload process is a breeze at least. How's the LO shop going Bryan? Remember throwing these ideas to spend our tokens on something?

Well... that was the line I got from Peter himself. I had a decent 60-70% approval rate for half a year and in the last month, it dropped to 20%. Of course all the rejections were the now infamous "thanks, but we are not looking for such image right now". Why I wondered? My technique improved, my selection stringency improved (my approval rate at Shutterstock and iStock is at almost 100% now) yet here almost every picture was being rejected (70 of 84 rejected). So I wrote a message to the admins blasting the reviewers basically insinuating that there was a reviewer out to get me, blah, blah, blah, two days later I got a response and a re-review of my images (additional 7 were accepted).

Anyways... here's a quote "...I took a look at your recent uploads and I approved some more although in most cases I have to agree with the admin who checked them. On StockXpert travel photos don't sell too well, just try searching for Rome and you'll see how few downloads they have. Still, many people want to upload travel stock so we are very selective..."

Anyways to follow up, EVERY SINGLE non travel photo I submitted got accepted recently. I ticks me off because I like travel photography and almost nothing else, but... at least now I know.

Quote from: leaf on February 02, 2007, 07:27
they are a good site to submit to and worth your time, however their number of images need to be taken with a grain of salt.  No one has figure out how they count their images, but it obviously is not the same way everyone else does.

That's not true Tyler. This has been figured out LONG ago. The number of photos advertised is the total number of photos submitted. This corresponds perfectly to the ID numbers of newest photos. This doesn't take into consideration all the photos rejected (about 50%) and deleted by users (who knows...). So Fotolia's much closer to a million images. Then again, they've always had problems with being honest (10% referral sales commission? Yeah... RIGHT. 10% of Fotolia's NET)

Is anyone else starting to think there is a lot of hot air with the Lucky Oliver? All the wonderful things, all the growing sales... just no one's really seeing it, eh? I'm standing at $50 growing at about a $1-$2 a week. That's going to get me a payout by autumn. Not impressive.

Anyways... still got tons of tokens to spend , you guys?