Indexing issues

Ok.... Here's a problem, or at least what I see as a problem/conundrum/irritation.. whathaveyou, that some people may not agree with. And whether or not they do is something I'm actually highly curious to know.

I just modified my meta tags on the Sodapop.nu Wordpress category and single page templates, to tell search engines NOT to index ANY of my art/photography (whether it's my large-sized images or their lower-res. thumbnail counterparts), and not to index ANY of my single pages about individual works.

But, why?! you may ask. Why would want to reduce the number of visitors you might get?! And the reason why I'm able to give up these so-called visits comes down to a number of things.

When I compose these pages, I'm not doing so to be SEO-savvy. I'm organizing my art in a manner that I feel would be conducive to showing it to people for the first time (because that's what this website is now for... I don't have the luxury of gallery shows - this is what I do instead. This is my medium of publication. And that's how I'm using it. ANYWAY). I decide on a title for my photo series (or artwork) and that title becomes the page header (because it's the title of the series) and the alt tag for each image (again... because it's the title of the series!) out of a concern for consistency. Is this intended to tell a search engine anything? NO. It's intended to communicate something about why a human being should give a crap about these pictures. But it's just not for a search engine.

Might this be an issue on my part? Should I be trying to tell a search engine something instead? Am I just dumb? I don't think so - but give me feedback, if you feel the need. I really do want to know.

Anyway, because I'm not writing these pages with the intention of getting my images on a search engine, if someone found them that way, I'd feel embarassed. And if I was in the visitor's shoes, I might even get pissed. Because this sort of crap happens to me a lot - I'm searching for something with Google and someone's irrelevantly blogged BULLSHIT appears. Or I'm searching for some image and someone's completely UNRELATED image keeps showing up. This is something that annoys the living hell out of me.

Here's an imaginary scenario for which this might happen to a particular accidental, erroneous, search engine-promoted visitor. The content, however, is not imaginary. I have a photo series I published in August called The sun also rises. Does this have anything to do with.... Say... a book cover for the novel called The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway? Or an illustration based on the novel? Or really anything to do with the novel? Not really. It's named after some graffiti featured in one of the photos (and because it suits the message I'm trying to convey by selecting to record and share these images of this graffiti in the first place). So if I'm a hypothetical visitor trying to find something to do with the novel on Google image search and these images pop up because all of the alt tags contain 'The sun also rises' and the page title is 'The sun also rises,' I'm going to be pissed because they have nothing directly to do with that. And so I don't care.

So "should" I actually be structuring my pages differently because of how search engines work? I don't really want to, because this is my publication. How I publish the art for humans to consider matters more to me. The impact it's going to make on a person matters a whole lot more to me. I want people to see what I do... But not on accident when they're looking for something else. If they're not going to care, then they're not going to care, so why waste their time? These single and category pages exist solely to let people view photos or artwork of mine when people WANT to be doing that. They're not named to help people find the photos on a search engine because the photos aren't meant to be informational and indexed like information. And my ideal viewer is one who is searching for fine art photography for the hell of just looking at fine art photography - not because they're trying to see a place, not because they want it for documentation purposes, not because they want to see an illustration of Lady Brett Ashley, but because they want to look at a collection of work by one photographer and for my site that would happen to be me. With my weird titles that are only intended to give meaning to the work... Not to help people find an information-rich source on Google, because there's no relevant information present if they're not looking to sit around and stare at something for an hour.

So... is this too much to ask? Am I just being snooty? Should I break down and share? Should I break down and fix the way I code to cater to a bunch of search engine crawlers? Does this even make sense?

.... Honestly, meta tags just made more sense to me back in the days when the author's provided information was still weighed heavily in the indexing of pages. So the way I lay out my alt tags, headers, links and lists wouldn't matter as much as me saying HEY GOOGLE, THIS IS FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY WITH ODDLY NAMED STUFF, DON'T TRY TO PRESENT IT AS ANYTHING ELSE, BECAUSE THAT ISN'T WHAT IT IS AND IF I WAS TRYING TO FIND THAT, I'D BE PISSED IF I FOUND THIS. K THANKS A BUNCH.

Sigh.