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We have been contributing to Alamy for several years and have recently noticed the keywords on our "for sale" images have been rearranged. Alamy says they have re-ordered the keywords alaphabetically, but the sense of the key words has also been changed, We have followed the guidlines ie: no commas and putting square brackets around combined words. Here is an example of an image we keyworded:

 

[three walkers][Offas Dyke]tourism[national trail]Wales[Vale of Clwyd]Denighshire Ruthin[market town][national trail]hiking rambling ramblers hikers[middle aged]men outdoors exercise health old[elderly men]retirement hobby activity alpenstock[walking stick]sun view[fresh air]hills[Moel Famau]path

 

And here are the keywords off the Alamy site:

 

 
Keywords have been merged together and many don't make sense ie "sticksun"
 
I'm worried that if a buyer is looking for an image then the merging of some keywords will affect the search.
 
Anybody else have these concerns ? I have contacted Alamy and they have said I will have to alter all the keywords using quotation marks rather than square brackets, but this will involve a lot of extra work.
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Hi McCoy Wynne:

 

I noticed this yesterday in my images which came live yesterday and notified Alamy.  No reply yet.

 

I do use quotation marks, so that is not the problem.  Groups of words seem to be arbitrarily grouped, selected from both

Main and Comprehensive sections (I believe).

 

When you do a search for these newly grouped and separated by comma words, I find they don't come up in any searches.

 

So......something is amiss!!

 

Kathy deWitt

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Square brackets are not mentioned in the guidelines.. In your case they have simply been ignored and in the absence of a space words have been joined. it's not the complete answer but you evidently shouldn't have been using them. Alamy recommend only spaces.

I do put groups of words in quotes in case Alamy ever implement that.

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Whether or not you use square brackets, you still need spaces.  So [Offas Dyke]tourism[national trail], for example, creates "Dyketourismnational" once the brackets are removed.  The algorithm does not recognise the bracket as a space, nor does it substitute a space when it removed the brackets. Square brackets were suggested to loosely link words (as opposed to quotes, which should enforce linking, but don't on Alamy).  So you need to re-visit your keywords and make sure there is a space either side of the brackets, or remove the brackets and replace each one with a space.

 

Chris

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The rearranging has been discussed here a lot: it's for the zoom page only. For searches your own keyword order is used. Keywords grouped by quotation marks "" will appear together on the zoom page. In searches they will be seen as belonging together, but not exclusively! "John Brown" will still turn up in searches for John only and for Brown only.

 

wim

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Thanks for all your replies. It seems I will have to edit all the keywords on our images. Alamy definately recommended square brackets under "additionol annotation options" for words linked together. Maybe the problem we have is that we haven't left a space, the brackets have been removed by Alamy and the words re-ordered alaphabetically. The below is copied from Alamy:

 

Tells the search engine that words within square brackets are related, but not necessarily to be treated as an exact phrase. Syntax Square brackets around words [ ]. Example [giant squid] [blue whale] Outcome This image can be found under searches for giant squid or blue whale, but it can also be found for searches for squid or whale etc. Benefit This will improve the relevancy of your images This helps you define to the customer that it’s the squid that is ‘giant’ and the whale that is ‘blue’ but also that the words on their own are relevant too.  
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Over the weekend the problem I had last week has reoccured.  If you have

 

"bracketed words" with a string of words in between like this "and then more bracketed words"  

 

the words between the two sets of brackets are treated like a bracketed phrase......

 

if you see what I mean.

 

I detected this last night so I attempted to rectify this problem by adding extra spaces before and

after  "bracketed words".  It seems to have made the words in between into separate search terms.

 

Had I not done this, the words between bracketed phrases aren't individually searchable.

 

Whew!

 

Kathy

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This is exactly my problem. I'm new and have spaces between my keywords but discovered that Alamy merges som of them so they make no sense. For example "shades" and year "1750" become "shades 1750". I'm gonna use comma from now on or try double space.  :wacko:

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