Alamy's blog post on discoverability

[Jill Morgan]

I checked out Alamy's new blog on discoverability, and it seems they are pushing really low low important keywords that will give people more false views than real views.

 

This is there image of good discoverability for keywords on an image. They don't show the actual image, so not sure how many other's are relevant.

 

 

Now maybe the people at Alamy don't know anything about dogs, but French Bulldogs and Bulldogs are two different breeds of dog.  So there should not be a Bulldog tag.  And using idiotic keywords like ears, muzzle, patches. snout, nose, eyes and even small and big at the same time. Yet they don't have "Purebred Dog"  or "pushed face dog" as one of the keywords. And they have outdoors and small as both supertags and a regular tags.  And really, 'fresh air" is really pushing it.  I could go on and on.  So Alamy is saying to put in useless words to get that magic green bar that in the long run is only going to drop a contributor's CTR because of all the false views.

 

Shame Alamy.

 

Jill

[Craig Yates]

Have a look at the images and see how many keywords could match. It is one of 4 images. HR205X, HR205W, HR205T, or HGKH7H.

Edited July 21, 2021 by Craig Yates

[Jill Morgan]

19 minutes ago, Craig Yates said:

Have a look at the images and see how many keywords could match. It is one of 4 images. HR205X, HR205W, HR205T, or HGKH7H.

 

If these are the images, lets add standing, reflection, countryside,  and walk to the list of useless words.

 

And if these are the images, the caption is crap.

 

Jill

Edited July 21, 2021 by Jill Morgan
Edited to realize the black and white refers to the dog, duh

[FocusUno]

1 hour ago, Jill Morgan said:

is only going to drop a contributor's CTR

but what effect lower CTR on ranking and sales, haven't many reported none

[Mr Standfast]

polpular ?

 

I rest my case m'lud.

[Jill Morgan]

18 minutes ago, FocusUno said:

but what effect lower CTR on ranking and sales, haven't many reported none

 

There are many factors that go in to a contributors placement on pages, CTR is one.  Having green discoverability is not one. If you are new and don't have any reputation of sorts as good sales percentages, etc, CTR is going to be a higher marker as there aren't a lot of other factors to include.  Useless views are just that, useless.  Telling the contributor to put in a better caption, such as "Portrait of Cute Purebred Black and White French Bulldog Sitting and Looking At Camera" would get the contributor more relevant views than keywords such as muzzle and walk. And they left out plurals such as "dogs, French bulldogs, purebred dogs, Frenchies etc.  Alamy doesn't do auto extensions, so if someone searches French Bulldogs, this person's images won't come up.

 

That would be better advice than just slap in a bunch of stupid words.  Where is the countryside?

 

Jill

[M.Chapman]

Even if CTR isn't used in image placement any more, (re-ranks appear to have stopped), adding irrelevant keywords just to "get into the green" means the customer may see more irrelevant thumbnail previews, wasting their time.  In this highly competitive market Alamy should be doing everything to encourage efficient accurate keywording to give their customers an even better experience, and getting rid of the discoverability indicator (or revising it), rather than writing blogs to encourage its use. The CTR graph is a good idea to encourage efficient keywording and captioning and is visible to all contributors. It's such a shame that actively using changes in a contributor's CTR as part of the image placement algorithm seems to have stopped. Maybe they will reinstate reranks one day?  The blog should also deter the indiscriminate use of auto-keywording software / keyword scraper websites.

 

Mark

Edited July 21, 2021 by M.Chapman

[Colin Woods]

What Mark says. I had a look at the blog ( first time in ages - I think its just social media fluff) and its pretty comical, just after the grossly over-keyworded example posted above, there is then a paragraph saying why relevant keywords are important. I get the feeling that the author of the piece doesn't do much keywording. At least, not for Alamy.

Edited July 21, 2021 by Colin Woods

[Jill Morgan]

I also noticed the comparison is between 2 different images, as in the first, their poor example, it is about a Cocker Spaniel, where the second, the supposed good example is about a French Bulldog.

 

I see there are no comments allowed anymore on the new blog posts either.

 

Jill

[meanderingemu]

this is outrageous.   @Alamy why are you encouraging contributor to add marginal barely relevant keywords?  

[meanderingemu]

here, green bar 

[meanderingemu]

56 minutes ago, Colin Woods said:

What Mark says. I had a look at the blog ( first time in ages - I think its just social media fluff) and its pretty comical, just after the grossly over-keyworded example posted above, there is then a paragraph saying why relevant keywords are important. I get the feeling that the author of the piece doesn't do much keywording. At least, not for Alamy.

at first i thought this was an outsider blogger who just pushed material and Alamy published it, but this is actually an Alamy employee who is advising people to spam keywords.  

[Steve F]

Maybe Alamy's trying to reward the 'old hands' who know(???) what they're doing... 🙃

[meanderingemu]

20 minutes ago, Steve F said:

Maybe Alamy's trying to reward the 'old hands' who know(???) what they're doing... 🙃

by creating irrelevant search results to the customers?

 

[wiskerke]

48 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

here, green bar 

We will all be following this image closely!

If it jumps ahead of all the others, we'll know what to do. 😂

 

wim

[John Mitchell]

This looks like the type of "everything but the kitchen sink" keywording that you often see on microstock sites, especially ones that have keyword-generators. I've tried this type of tagging with some of my RF images, and it doesn't seem to have made any difference. However, as Wim hinted at, perhaps Alamy knows something that we don't. 😉

[Radim]

The author has demonstrated a classic ignorance of a specific problem and the result is misleading information. What I can agree with is that relevant keywords are important

[Mr Standfast]

Going a bit off topic...

 

Stefan Rousseau's latest blog "Passover in Southend"  was a pleasure to read.

 

[Stokie]

11 hours ago, meanderingemu said:

here, green bar 

 

As far as I know, capital letters don't make any difference, so all the 'cannabis' and 'pot' words would be treated as just one word in a search.

 

Is that the case (no pun intended)?

 

John.

 

Edit: just seen the post below saying caps don't make a difference.

Edited July 22, 2021 by Stokie

[Cryptoprocta]

Maybe they've discovered that Alamy customers love wading through irrelevant images in their searches.

 

Sarcasm apart, I hope they never factor discoverability into ranking.

 

It also makes ranking uber important. As a good proportion of buyers only look at the first page, and a good proportion of files in many searches are irrelevant, a lot of relevant files are not being seen by many buyers.

 

Shame on you, Alamy. (Again)

[Harry Harrison]

I was really hoping that the new, better, blog post on Third Party Rights and Rights Clearance was a positive sign of things to come. What a disapointment to read this new 'discoverability' blog post.

[meanderingemu]

2 hours ago, Stokie said:

 

As far as I know, capital letters don't make any difference, so all the 'cannabis' and 'pot' words would be treated as just one word in a search.

 

Is that the case (no pun intended)?

 

John.

 

Edit: just seen the post below saying caps don't make a difference.

 

but now I have a green bar, so as per the other of the blog, an Alamy employee, my results should be better as i have "High discoverability", and this of course without creating false search results.

 

(note i deleted them after doing it, now will try testing if She is correct for real)

Edited July 22, 2021 by meanderingemu

[Stokie]

1 minute ago, meanderingemu said:

 

but now I have a green bar, so as per the other of the blog, an Alamy employee, my results should be better as i have "High discoverability", and this of course without creating false search results.

 

 

(note, of course she was wrong, and it did not affect search results one bit)

 

Lucky you having a green bar!!😁

 

Perhaps it will make up for the 20% drop in revenue just round the corner............

 

John.

[meanderingemu]

18 minutes ago, Stokie said:

 

Lucky you having a green bar!!😁

 

Perhaps it will make up for the 20% drop in revenue just round the corner............

 

John.

 

someone has to pay for these blogs 🙄

[Normspics]

It really is the throw some mud against the wall and see what sticks theory. I decided to try this with one of my latest images and got to 35 keywords (some are phrases which only count as one keyword), after the 35 keywords I was becoming embarrassed by the stretching the point of words. I still couldn’t get to green even with a complete street name, city and country all the questions filled in. 
 

If they had said “discoverable” was now part of the search and all those green images would be given preference in search results, then that would be worth contemplating, but in the end it is spamming and there are plenty of irrelevant images being spammed on the internet at various agencies.

[meanderingemu]

6 minutes ago, Normspics said:

It really is the throw some mud against the wall and see what sticks theory. I decided to try this with one of my latest images and got to 35 keywords (some are phrases which only count as one keyword), after the 35 keywords I was becoming embarrassed by the stretching the point of words. I still couldn’t get to green even with a complete street name, city and country all the questions filled in. 
 

If they had said “discoverable” was now part of the search and all those green images would be given preference in search results, then that would be worth contemplating, but in the end it is spamming and there are plenty of irrelevant images being spammed on the internet at various agencies.

 

 

if you want to get it green, other the than CapITal game, just re-enter your Supertags as non-supertags, for some reason that counts as 2 KWs.    i'll change one of mine also to test and report on this tomorrow