Thursday, January 17, 2013

Does Google demote itself?

Google must have one of the best online art galleries on the web, yet you've probably never heard of it let alone discovered it from a Google search.

The Google Art Project is a fantastic treasure trove of high resolution photographs of the collections of some of the worlds most famous art galleries. But, when you do a Google search for "art collection", "renaissance art", "renaissance paintings" or "renaissance gallery" the site is no-where to be seen.

It makes me wonder why this would be, after all, you could forgive a company for wanting to promote their own stuff first, right? And, it is a great site.

Has Google just done a poor job SEO-ing their own site? There's no shortage of references to it on the web. Opensiteexplorer.com says it has awesome domain authority and inbound links. Me not being technical at all might be missing a 'dev' issue as to why it isn't ranking, but it is a real shame this site doesn't pop up more often.

On this note, it's also worth mentioning the Web Gallery of Art - another site that sadly doesn't rank as well as it should. It might not be as sexy as the Google Art Project or have the hi-resolution, but it certainly has indexed many more paintings.