Sponsoring Pages

Yep, appears to be gone. It hasn't work right for a while now anyway.

I noticed the same thing Judy and David.

I can't imagine FAA not having this as it's a great way for FAA to rank higher in the search engines by all of us linking back to FAA.

This happened a few months back where the sponsor link vanished for about a hour or two and then the sponsor link showed up again.

I contacted support yesterday regarding this letting them know it happened yesterday Thursday, March 01, 18 around 9:30am California time. Now waiting to hear back or to see the sponsor link back up.

If you contacted Tech Support, I will not respond just yet whilst I try and find out what's happening. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks Abbie! For me, this worked. If I logged out and did a search for one of the keywords I sponsored, around 90% of the time 2 or 3 of my images would show up on the first page. I wanted to start doing more and it was gone! I hope this is just a glitch because I think this is a nice way for some of us to do a little extra work to get our work on the first page.

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I must have missed the announcement so I just checked. Wow - the ones I had successfully put in the sponsor spots - for the last couple of years - are all gone. So I suppose I'll be removing a few dozen back-links to Fine Are America and Pixels. But I'll wait a while to see what the response may be. Hopefully it's just a glitch.


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~ Bill
~ My Assateague Wild Horses Photography Blog

Same problem here, no more link to "sponsor this page" on the search results.
Looking the visitors log file, the number of visitors to my artwork dropped by 90%, and this problem started around one week ago.

At the same time the FAA search results layout page changed. Now it has the two top lines with types of media samples (canvas, metal print, cases, etc.), instead results.
And this comes on top of the so called "cured collections" that now are in the third line and are promoting anything, except quality art and healthy competition, keeping on top a number of "chosen" artists.

According to Alexa.com around 50% of FAA sales are connected to internet searches at Google and others, that rank FAA especially according to the number of links to it, links placed by artists using the "sponsor this page" feature. If artists remove the links, then FAA quickly will loose a large portion of visitors.

And if the artists decide to upload their artwork to other websites to compensate what they are loosing at FAA, then maybe will trigger the beginning of the end for FAA.

FAA is a great platform for artists and I would like to believe this is only a temporary problem, and soon everything will be as before.

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I'm changing my marketing efforts to link straight to Fine Art America anyway.

For my part, all I need to do is get the right combination of keywords that people will actually use to find my images, and get images online that people are looking for.

Sponsoring a keyword was too vague anyway; just to maybe get a few pictures up there; that people would skim over, in a race to get through the 10,000+ images in front of them.

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📷 Michel
🌎 Travel Photograpy on Demand.

I'm changing my marketing efforts to not bother with FAA at all. Sales were rare before but now with the changes in search, (both on FAA and Google) they'll be all but impossible, my time will be better spent elsewhere. In fact I deleted all FAA links from my blogger/website and redirected my domain back to that, my focus will be on originals now. I consider POD to be a bust.

David,

I replied to you in another thread.

Hope you think again.

At least rethink your strategy.

Agree with concentrating on originals; but in the age of the World Wide Web, it helps if people know where to find the originals.

I don't know how much you charge for originals, but originals can only be sold once.

Once the original is sold (or if people can't afford the original), you can always link to the 'Buy a Print'; as a sideline.

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📷 Michel
🎨 Artists and Photographers on Instagram.

The sponsor thing never worked anyway, so no loss.

David, I don't bother with FAA anymore either when it comes to promoting my work. I do much better when I promote and send customers to my other POD site. Thank god I gave that site a try. It's restored my confidence.

I don't understand those who say it didn't work. I thought it worked great! If you use common words like flower, butterfly, tree, etc., then you do compete against a lot of other artists who also sponsor that word. But if you are more specific with the keyword like Clematis Miss Bateman, Monarch Butterfly or Red Oak Tree then the chances that someone else sponsored those keywords is less and your work shows up on the first page.

There is no need to sponsor 'Clematis Miss Bateman' as there are only 10 results and nine of them are yours.

The only reason to sponsor was to try and get a slight edge on the 10,000+ returns.

Monarch Butterfly does have 10,000+ so you can bet your life there was competition for the sponsored slots too; so, theoretically, almost useless.

Graham Gercken seems to have quite a monopoly on Red Oak Trees; must be his middle name. Sponsor that one, and you sponsor him.

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📷 Michel
🌎 Keyword Searching Made Easy.

Michel, those were just examples off the top of my head. I don't even have a Red Oak Tree. The point I was trying to make which obviously went over your head is that the more specific you are, the greater the chances that something of yours will show up on the first page. For example, if you sponsor the word lion, you are now competing with any animal with the name lion, like sea lion, mountain lion. But, if you have an African Lion, then you need to sponsor that. If you just sponsor generic words like butterfly and flower, then you have two chances you will have something show up on the first page, slim and none.

It is a shame if it is gone for good. I look forward to hearing from Abbie when she hss found out more.

Following

Following

Id be interested in this funtionality too, I never realised what it was before. Unfortunately my image tweeting in the group run by Judy and Floydd is no longer pulling in the image but just the pixels or FAA logo, it was fine for a few days but never worked using my pixels artist website, does anyone know why? cheers

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I totally agree with Judy. I always work for my page sponsoring. Great amount of my images were in the first pages of search by variety of key words. Now they have all disappeared. An effort of thousands of links placed and days of work dedicated to this task have been lost? We deserve an FAA response about what will happen to this.

Maybe I didn't give the sponsoring thing enough of a chance, or maybe I didn't understand how to use it properly...surprised to see that some people liked it.

I believe my first few sales probably came from search sponsorships. Search sponsorships stopped working right for me over a year ago and that's about when sales dried up for me too. Could be a coincidence however, there's no way to know for sure.

Demons in the system! expunge the demonic spirits!

Since the "sponsor this page" link went missing now if you do a search you will find the same artist promoted 3-5 times and more on the page you just searched. I tried this this morning using the search terms tree, trees, los angeles, the beatles, beatles, bob dylan and john lennon and the same artist came up using the search terms I listed displaying their work 3-5 times on the first page and there after for all the other products listed.

I'm confident FAA is working hard behind the scenes and fixing all the above.

Would love to hear and get update from Abbie on this.

Not wishing to be annoying, but I came across a security issue on one of the artists in the tweeting group, it threw up a warning that the .pixels of hers was not to be trusted and might be trying to pillage you, she is legitimate I think no doubt, and quite a popular seller, on further investigation ( pressed details of it) it unravelled to be invalid trust certificates from the url masking and forwarding implemented by godaddy on her .pixel site, as I use a similar domain masking and forwarding, the possibility of such a trust failure in my odd problem is possible, yet she was able to tweet her images but I could not and still cannot unless I do a few tricks without using myown url. Are there different trust certificates for subdomains and main domains etc.. I hope this helps illucidate the problem.

Any updates on this??

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Six days and FAA is silent...

I asked Abbie sidebar and all she has is that Sean is working it. Until Sean has a definitive answer, we're not likely to hear much of anything.

I think the professional way is to come and clarify if the "sponsor this page" feature was removed permanently or if there is a technical malfunction and the feature will be restored.

Also, the sponsor link seems only part of the problem. As reported by somebody else, in this thread, ... I did a number of searches and what is shown as result are artwork done by a small number of artists. In all cases the first page of results was shown multiple artworks of the same artist. In some cases were shown over 10 artworks of the same artist right in the first page of results. The chosen ones (?).

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Not sure whether to remove the sponsor links from my website or not. They don't link to any of my work anymore, but it was nice when they did. Maybe I'll give it another week.

Judy, I did what I said. Hopefully I'll know soon

Guys, I'm not going to keep coming in a thread to say 'i don't know yet'

As soon as I know, you'll know.

@Leonardo DiGenio, that's just how the search works, it's been that way since forever. Search ranking is computed 'per artist', not 'per image' so an artist who's sold a lot in the past can end up flooding the search, even for things he's never sold. Plenty of old threads on this.

There are 25 criteria points for searches

25 things that lead to being further near the front

Hi, as promised.................

Sponsoring keywords is going to be gone for the month of March. Too many people were spamming it with irrelevant keywords and some really terrible images.

It will probably be back in April, but we need to address the spamming first.

I think keyword spamming as a whole needs to be addressed. For instance, one of my keywords is Clematis. If you do a search of Clematis, when you get to the 4th page, you start seeing things that don't have anything to do with clematis. We have cars, skylines, ants and every imaginable flower. I submit work to various stock photography websites and they are very strict on keyword spamming and they will throw out images if the person has spammed keywords. I think they should do that here as well, or give the person the chance to correct their keywords.

Been away for a while - just notice the sponsor pages gone - apparently just for the month as per Abbie.
Understandable to clean up spamming keywords. A good thing to address.

While I was checking a couple pages to see if it was just a glitch on one page - at a glance I noticed some spammed images.
Pelicans, palm trees, tropical flower, rural and beach images on Central Australia page - ummm it's an arid desert.
Any sort of vegetation, animals and birds struggles from lack of water..
Seriously? pelicans, palm trees live 1,600kms from Central Australia in any direction and there is no ocean.
Spent many months in the Centre and never saw any of the above subjects.


Yet spamming will always be rife and not addressed for some Judy.

Before anyone questions - it's like saying Hawaii and Maine is Nevada

It is now April, any word on when or if this will be back?

Thanks

Mike

Lexa, the example you have is not spammed images. In a two word search the search engine will combine keywords, so an image tagged Australia and Central Coast shows up in a search for Central Australia. That is just the nature of search engines . They are not mind readers and don't understand the meaning of the words. They just find matches. People searching are not looking for encyclopedia accuracy and can easily skip images that don't fit what they are looking for.

I have now responded here https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=4025185