The photools.com website seems to be more popular...?

[Mario]

Websites these days are not written for humans but for the Google search engine bot. This is called SEO or "search engine optimization." The bot scans your site, and then the "algorithm" decides if and where to place your site in the Google search results.

You may have experienced SEO when you just wanted a cookie recipe, but had to wade through five pages of text, explaining the history of flour, baking, and a heart-warming story about the blog owner's grandma baking cookies to save starving children during WWII.

Everything that is not the 1., 2., or 3. cookie recipe on that page is SEO fluff, designed to make the blog post look more relevant and important to the Google bot in hopes of improving search engine ranking.

Google also demands specific metadata be included in specific places (to make the site easier for the Google bot to digest). If there are not enough links pointing to your site, it is considered irrelevant and demoted in the search results. This is why large "link farms" exist, maintaining thousands or tens of thousands of pages with the sole purpose of linking to each other to simulate "interest," attempting to trick the Google bot.

Which brings me to the actual content of this post:

My impression that photools.com is somehow ranking higher than before is due to receiving 10 to 20 collaboration emails per week. People (usually from strange Gmail accounts and not official company email addresses!) ask what it would cost to place an article on photools.com, or if I would like to trade posts—placing a post of theirs on photools.com in exchange for placing one of mine on their sites.

The general idea is to let them place an SEO-optimized post about whatever on other popular sites, in order to generate more links and improve the ranking of their promotions (be it a casino, spam, or snake oil) in Google.

I never received such emails before. I have optimized the help for the 2025 version of the Google bot by dutifully adding "alt" image descriptions to each image (several hundred!) and written more articles for the photools.com blog about IMatch- and DAM-related topics. Probably, these measures gave photools.com a boost...

Big companies have entire SEO departments producing a constant stream of "content" for Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok, and more to please the Google bot. And, occasionally, provide something of value to their customer base 

I don't have time or budget for this, but I try to post at least one new blog post every two weeks or so. If you have ideas for interesting IMatch or DAM-related topics, let me know below.

[mopperle]

Hallo Mario, durch Zufall habe ich gerade gesehen, dass Du im Impressum auf deiner Webseite noch auf mycommerce/digitalriver verweist.

[Mario]

Hallo Mario, durch Zufall habe ich gerade gesehen, dass Du im Impressum auf deiner Webseite noch auf mycommerce/digitalriver verweist.

Danke für den Hinweis. Ich habe die Seiten aktualisiert.