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Image "alt" attribute

BarbaraM Member
in General support
I may or may not be using tinyZenpage correctly. Call it improvising but my website is static html but I found I can use tinyZenpage to get the code to put image thumbnails on my website with my static articles. It works for my purpose I don't know if there is a downside to using it like this.

Anyway, the code does include the "alt" attribute and just uses the filename of the image which isn't always the best description of the image. I've always thought that the "alt" could help with Google finding and indexing images so I've always put in a brief phrase, tags or a sentence for the "alt". Maybe not the best SEO strategy by it seemed to work for me.

I've looked everywhere for an option/setting or plugin to maybe allow for a better "alt" like using the tags from the images rather than changing all of them manually.

Is there any way to do this?

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    tinyZenpage uses the title of the image if one is set. Zenphoto sets the filename if no specific title is set always and tinyZenpage follows that. There is no option to changed that on tinyZenpage. The tool should be simple and not overloaded with options.

    You can of course edit any html afterwards directly in the editor by clicking on the "<>" button.
  • BarbaraM Member
    Thanks. Just checking to see if I missed some obvious setting or option.

    I'm trying to improve Google indexing but it hasn't been easy to figure. I've enabled the sitemap plugin today and Google Verify a week ago. It's a challenge with a static website but even things on my static front page are indexed most of the time within a few days.
  • BarbaraM Member
    BTW....I had been using xml-sitemaps.com sitemap generator for my static site. I just ran the generator and it indexed my site as usual but also Zenphoto Gallery "pages" too.

    The Zenphoto sitemap extended plugin generated a lot more xml sitemaps of course but only for the Gallery.

    Can I continue to use the other sitemap generator too so that my static site and the gallery are both included?
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Good that you noticed that you must be run via a utility button on the admin overview page to generate the sitemap files. Zenphoto creates several files because it uses an index sitemap file as of the official specification: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index

    Following that spec an individual sitemap can only have a certain number of entries. No normal site will reach that number naturally but we already use the division to be prepared.

    I see several possible issues on our ZP site:
    • You have set full images as protected view. That means the full images itself cannot be crawled via the page itself, only the cached image can. Unless that is intended of course.
    • Image page does not use modrewrite suffix. I don't know what google exactly does but might reject the image page as code pretending to be an image as the url looks like a direct link to an image. This is a guess only. But try adding a modrewrite suffix on the options.
    • Check rhe robots.txt of Zenphoto. If you have still one from an older Zenphoto that was a bit too strict blocking any image indexing. Also add the sitemap index file to that file.
    You can of course use any sitemap creator if it is able to crawl the Zenphoto part correctly. Our site seems to be indexed pretty good using our sitemap generator though. We gladly improve it in case you can find out why your site is not using it.
  • BarbaraM Member
    Thank you. I'd like to think that maybe I know more than I think I do but I actually researched forum posts for info about the sitemaps. :)

    And did you just give me a homework assignment. More research to do. It just never ends. LOL

    1. I do have images set to Protected View. I've had trouble in the past with sites hotlinking images.

    I thought that hotlinking could not be prevented in Unprotected View in Zenphoto Image options. Could I prevent hotlinking of Zenphoto Gallery by using the htaccess in my roots htdocs?

    2. Robots - Zenphoto 1.4.6 is my first ever install so I don't think there would be anything from an older version. I found a robots.txt file in the /htdocs/gallery and it is empty. I looked in zp-core and found example_robots.

    Should the the Zenphoto robots.txt be empty?

    3. I'll save the modrewrite question for tomorrow. :)

    I can see the sitemap does a good job of indexing Zenphoto and some images are starting to show up in Google today.

    thank you
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    You should of course search but I rather understand it since the search of our forum is pretty bad (we are working on that…).

    1. Yes, there is even a htaccess example for hotlink protection on our site. Note the difference between the sized (cached) images and the full images.
    http://www.zenphoto.org/news/htaccess-against-hotlinking
    (the warning note is a bit generic. Since it is by me it is of cours supported more or less - besides that the htaccess example can be found in other places as well.)

    2. The 1.4.6 one is fine then. The default one that setup normally creates is not empty. You find the example on in `/zp-core/example_robots.txt`. It is of coursre just a suggestion you don't need to use. By default it disallows the full images to be indexed.

    3. Ok, maybe I am wrong about the modrewrite suffix. It was just a guess given that in the past server security on some servers triggered if you use `.php` as a suffix for a similar reason. That is why the default now is `.html`
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