People often say that promoting your own website is difficult. Especially if you are a small business owner doing it all by yourself.
What is rarely explained is why.
This post documents one specific, real example.
A single object, one real owner
Here is a rare brooch by Mexican modernist Antonio Pineda.
Being it a used item - there is only one physical object in this exact state and condition.
I am the sole owner of it.
The photography is mine.
The condition is not perfect, and the photos are intentionally not flattering — they are detailed. Given the rarity of the piece, the brooch is still correctly valued at $440.
From a human perspective, this should be straightforward.
From a search system’s perspective, it is not.
The visibility paradox
As of December 7, 2025 (when the first version of this post was written), if you search for this brooch on Google — by keywords or by images — you will find it everywhere except where it is actually listed.
That result feels counterintuitive until you understand how image attribution works in practice.
How this happens
This brooch was photographed three separate times, each time for a different stage of selling.
1. Marketplace-first photography
The first set of photos was taken for eBay, before my website existed. Those images were scraped almost immediately by third-party crawlers.
At the time, this didn’t seem important.
2. Website launch and the “import” myth
When I later created my website, I already knew I couldn’t simply export my eBay listings into it — despite that being the default advice.
Technically, you can import listings.
Practically, if you sell truly rare items, you should not.
Why?
Because by the time your site exists, your images are often already scattered across the internet. If you reuse them, your own website becomes the least trusted copy.
From a system’s point of view, the question is not who created the images, but where they appeared first and where they appear most often.
So I took a second set of photos, listed the brooch on my website, and requested indexing.
3. Why that still didn’t work
Google does not rush to index new websites.
Crawlers do.
The second photo set was scraped again — before Google indexed my site.
By the time indexing happened, the images were already seen elsewhere. Once again, my website looked like the copy.
This time, the sequence was even worse:
new website → crawlers → legitimate marketplaces
That meant:
- Google still did not treat my site as the original source
- eBay downgraded the listing internally due to perceived duplication
Marketplaces tolerate duplicates only from highly trusted domains. When duplicates appear first on low-authority sites, legitimate listings are penalized.
The cost of misunderstanding originality
As of today, this brooch has been photographed three times.
Two complete photo sets are now unusable for attribution purposes.
I have hundreds of listings that will eventually require the same treatment.
This is one of the hidden costs of running an independent website.
What comes next
I photographed the brooch again today.
This time, the process is different — and I am confident it will work. The listing should resolve correctly within a few days.
The purpose of this post is not to complain, but to document why discoverability fails in practice, even when the content is original and the ownership is clear.
In the next part of this series, I explain how I ultimately solved the image attribution problem, and what tradeoffs were involved.
