Hash Bang: How We Beef Up Your Google Juice
It may just sound like a breakfast item to you, but hash bang is something we did to your gallery URLs to improve your SEO. Sitemaps was one, but we’ve tinkered with your gallery links to make it even more powerful.
Confused? Let’s start from the beginning.
Why the change?
To help Google index your gallery pages and get you found. Our old URLs made it easy for search engines to list the gallery, but not the individual image links due to the way they were dynamically created.
Our newest update makes it easier for Googlebots who are trying to crawl your site to index your gallery images on search engines. (Better indexing for AJAX-based pages, for you tech-minded folks.)
If you’re feeling daring you can check out the Google specs here and see exactly how and why this works.
How do I make sense of the new URLs?
Pull up your favorite gallery and zoom in on the URL. You used to see something like this:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#131487110_FdKeW
Now you’ll see this:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!i=131487110&k=FdKeW
Note the new “i” for image and the “k” for the image key. Those numbers and scrambled letters still mean the same things:
- Album ID: 2504559
- Album key: TrBCmb
- Image ID: 131487110
- Image key: FdKeW
Opening the lightbox looks just a little different, too, but see if you can spot the “lb”:
And if you click to another page in the gallery, you’ll see a couple of additional things in the URL:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!p=1&n=20
- P: Page number (page 1, here)
- N: Number of images per page (20 images, here)
If you get a direct image link, you’ll see that it looks pretty much the same as it did before:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/SuperheroGroup/131487110_FdKeW-L-5.jpg
Will my old page links break?
No way, José! We’ve made sure that your site, images and your business remain unchanged for smooth sailing through the week. If you do notice anything funny with your site, be sure to ping our Support Heroes and send us the deets.
What changes will I see in the coming weeks?
Better indexing, possibly more traffic and fanfare from new clients. 
Now that we’ve made all these changes, we can start cooking up even more exciting URL-based improvements to help folks who use SmugMug on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. All modern browsers that we love.
Don’t want your site to be found? Just like before, you can always enable SmugMug’s many privacy options and be left out of search results, search engines and Google Images.
And here’s further reading:
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This is fantastic. Thanks, folks.
Hello, When did you make this change? I think I’m already seeing improvements in my SEO stuff. Thanks, Leighton
Will this put an end to the experience for visitors delivered to my SmugMug-hosted blog as the result of a Google search matching an image’s keywords who are simply dumped at the front of a gallery containing 1,400 images, do not see any image of interest on the first page, and then go away again (presumably) scratching their heads?
Will SmugMug be facilitating Google in updating its indices retrospectively?
Hi Ross, here’s the dealio: What our change does is ensure that all the pages on your site are well indexed on Google. However this doesn’t really affect PageRanking, and it sounds like you have some pages on your site that are being more weighted more heavily than others. You may want to be sure that more sites link to other pages (like your blog), which should help.
Schmoo – this isn’t about page ranking. It’s about Google delivering a visitor to a SmugMug gallery on the basis of keywords used in the visitor’s search which are attached to a specific image in the gallery (not to the gallery), rather than delivering the visitor to the image itself, which is deep within the gallery. The visitor goes away perplexed, having been shown ten images on the first page of the (new journal style) gallery that have nothing whatever to do with the keywords used in his/her search! The gallery itself has no keywords related to any image subject matter, so why is the visitor delivered to the gallery, and not to the image of interest? Something’s slipping through the cracks between Google and SmugMug!
Hi again Ross and thanks for the detailed info. I’ve raised your issue up the chain and we’re looking into any potential issues with the Journal style URLs. We appreciate your help!
thanks so much for caring about your customers… you’ve made a lifetime client in me!!!
As usual, you’ve come through again! Best place on the ‘net for photographers. Thank you, SmugMug!
I’m lazy… is there a way to allow google to index just the gallery entrance, but not each individual image in that gallery? I want to block images but not the galleries from google.
Hi Sean, you bet there is. Go to your Control Panel, settings tab and set Hello World under SmugIslands to ‘homepage only’ more help: http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93329
ef yeah!
Interesting change. How will this affect random.mg?
Shouldn’t affect it at all, Samir.
Thank you for the quick reply Andy.
Will this new parameter format work on old galleries and images, say from 2006? Will the old non-paramter format (#image_key) work on new galleries?
Sean, I should clarify – this option will index your HOMEPAGE only – not any other galleries or pages on your site. There’s not a way to index just a gallery and not the underlying images in a gallery.
All of the galleries on my homepage? Not subgalleries?
http://prints.affinityseattle.com
Sean, it’ll just index what shows on your homepage. That’s it. This is if you choose that option in SmugIslands for “Homepage Only” http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93329
Sounds like there’s a feature request in the making. Made me wonder: Why isn’t there a nice landing page for each gallery with information, a feature image, general comments… that makes sense and that’s exactly the outer limit of where I want Google to index.
Hey Sean … http://feedback.smugmug.com we’d love your feature request!
A year after hashbangs were blasted for breaking the web, displayed as symptoms of bad programming, Smugmug implements them … they only exist ’cause sites were so reliant on Javascript, Google couldn’t index them without some sort of hacked workaround:
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/gawker-learns-the-hard-way-why-hash-bang-urls-are-evil/
I’m confused! How do I now parse the URL to get a direct image link to one of my photos?
Stupid question please disregard. Ana from Support has just reminded me of the “Share” button.
Samir, nothing with old links should change. If you find anything amiss, please do let us know.
Thank you again Andy. I’ll definitely watch for that.
What I was really interested in though was in how much I’ll have to modify a custom script which creates a link to an individual photo in a gallery. If the new method of specifying images will work for old galleries, or if the old format will work with new galleries, then I can just change everything to one format. Otherwise, I’ll have to make it ‘detect’ which type of image url path works.
Hello, When did you make this change? I think I’m already seeing improvements in my SEO stuff. Thanks, Leighton
Hi Leighton, it was late last week
Thanks!
Looks like the recent changes you made to urls has changed url structures. The below URL used to work to go to a category on my SmugMug site.
http://www.leightonphoto.com/Sailing Regattas
Now it goes to my index page on my Smug Mug site because the url does not exist.
Seems your software automatically changed the link to…
http://www.leightonphoto.com/Sailing-Regattas
and put a dash between the words ” Sailing and Regatta” I have tons of urls out there for the url that does not work now. Can a redirect be done?
Leighton,
The URL with the space in it works now