The Fine Art Blog of Daz and Holly

Awesome artist Babel Wallace only has 13 images associated with his name on Google so far (give him a chance and some encouragement and he’ll get plenty more I’m sure!). 3 of those 13 images listed in Google are actually mine, linked to his name because my blog uses proper SEO (search engine optimization) techniques.

I’m hoping that this painting by Babel Wallace called house of joy  will not only inspire us but also get indexed to his name. It would be nice for a fan of our friend to actually find his art by typing his name in a search engine!

I didn’t intend to ‘invade’ people’s image search with my own images, it’s just how the search engines work (for now anyway) and I’m happy to share what I know about this with you so you can try it too!

First of all, here’s what I’m talking about, I did a search for "babel wallace" because that’s his name, and the screen grab below shows the images that Google has listed (moderate safe search), note that 3 (so far) come directly from this blog.

The beautiful thing about this is that if our friend Babel Wallace was already famous he’d have lots of pics here, indexed with a greater relevance to his name, than the ones added by association from my humble blog -, those pictures would have lesser relevence.

Since Babel Wallace has only a few pics listed here (perhaps none of them so far are actually his work as he doesn’t have his own url yet,  Babel Wallace does have a fan page on Facebook curiously enough! (he is actually a famous musician and an awesome albiet newer painter!).

Oh, and why did my blog get 3 jpgs listed on the image search for somebody else’s name? Simply because Google randomly indexed some of my jpgs and I wrote the word Babel Wallace on a page that is a list of awesome artists on my blog. I listed a bunch of cool artists and WordPress and Google did the rest and now about 200 people a day find my blog by simply searching for their own name.

Just in case you think that people must be exploiting this, remember that Google knows the cheater blogs and the fake comments (if they get posted at all any more) and with Google’s image labeler process non-related pictures do not get associated as much. The fact that my blog is an amature art blog appears to give me SEO street cred!

I did have one artist get quite upset that my art appeared in a search for her name, and I will remove her name on her bequest, but most people seem to appreciate the fact that we, the little people who are independent entities simply showing our paintings and drawings (I have nothing for sale here and accept no bribes from companies or non-awesome types who want to exploit my SEO success) have control over the way the rest of the world sees us online.

***UPDATE FEB 01 2009 (5 days later)***

Now Google has added a bunch of pictures from this blog to the search for (use quotes!) "babel wallace", it still hasn’t added the one jpg that is actually tagged with Babel Wallace’s name though.

BTW, homersimplex.com IS this blog as well (I just have that url going to this blog too since I no longer have a separate site for my band), why in the hell Google chose to put that url on there is beyond my understanding at this moment, but my intent is to get our friend Babel Wallace more popular!!!

***UPDATE Febuary 27 2009 (one month later): Finally, the babel Wallace masterpiece at the top of this post is now indexed on Google. So now if you search for (use the quotes around the name!) "Babel Wallace" you can actually see his art in the image search!, There, mission accomplished! (btw there are 212 images now on a moderate safe search for "babel wallace" and most of them from this blog, see how this is a win-win situation!! )****

Inspire, be inspired and appreciate. Make lots of art and post it online!!!!

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