Search Engine Optimization

atomicmak

Hi all

I've been using my site for almost 3 years with zenphoto. I was working on site images today and found that google is not all the way crawling my all images and album,subalbum's.

I've Google Analytics enabled, Google Sitemaps are going through sitemap plugin .

To cross check I tried some subalbum search on google with my site keyword as back trace to see what are the listing done ?

The subalbum I tried is uploaded in 2010 nov and it just shows two link in google instead it has got almost 9 images in album.

Can somebody guide how should I try to work with zenphoto so as every image I upload go crawled by google and get place ?

I've put everything in image exif/iptc like title, description, keywords, image details and page source shows well details but no google ranks.

Kindly guide.
Here is my web url : www.wildart.in

acrylian

You hopefully know that the most `meta` values have no SEO value for years. Especially keywords don't.

What really counts is what you see ON the page itself. So if you use a lot of tags you should display them. Also hiding things via JS may hurt visitibitly of crawlers.

Also Google changes its algorithms constantly. SEO is a specific niche with its own experts (and sometimes a bit gray shady :-)). One of their latest update called "panda" cause a lot of sites to loose ranking.

It might be that mainly image gallery having not that much text content may not get that much ranking. As you surely know too there are a lot of image gallery sites that actually only exist to get ranking by providing lots of image people might look for.

In your case it seems to be that you use a robots.txt from an older release that is actually blocking everything. Since all is basically iamges that keeps also the page from being indexed I would guess. Google and all big search engines follow that advice no matter if there is a sitemap.

atomicmak

Thanks a lot acrylian.

so what your suggestion here is to udpate ?
Should I change sitemap ? Should I cahnge robots ?

plz guide.

atomicmak

Here's what I've made change to my robots.txt

User-agent: *
Allow: /albums/
Allow: /cache/
Allow: /uploaded/
Disallow: /themes/
Disallow: /zp-core/
Disallow: /zp-data/
Disallow: /page/search/
Disallow: /rss.php
Disallow: /rss-comments.php
Disallow: /README.html
Disallow: /rss-news-comments.php
Disallow: /rss-news.php
Sitemap: http://www.wildart.in/index.php?sitemap
Sitemap: http://wildart.in/index.php?sitemap

Do you think it really needs some more changes ?

atomicmak

Plz Ignore above robots change.
Here's the latest change I made. to my robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /albums/
Disallow: /themes/
Disallow: /zp-core/
Disallow: /zp-data/
Disallow: /page/search/
Disallow: /rss.php
Disallow: /rss-comments.php
Disallow: /README.html
Disallow: /rss-news-comments.php
Disallow: /rss-news.php
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /doc_files/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /art/
Sitemap: http://www.wildart.in/index.php?sitemap

acrylian

That should help since the images within /cache that is now allowed are the ones on the pages. So that should help indexing. It may take some days until Google and others update it.

The current default robots.txt looks like this:
`
User-agent: *
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/albums/
Allow: /zenphoto-dev/cache/
Allow: /zenphoto-dev/cache_html/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/themes/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/zp-core/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/zp-data/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/page/search/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/uploaded/
Disallow: /zenphoto-dev/backup/
`
The rss entries you have actually are obsolete as they don't exist anymore for quite some time.

atomicmak

Thanks acrylian.

will update and see if it does make a difference and post accordingly update here for others.

atomicmak

one more question. Since I allow people to view my original File.
Would it be good if I change one more line in robots.txt

Disallow: /albums/
to
Allow: /albums/

I think Googlebot-Images may scan for original larger files too then ?

acrylian

The robots.txt is just a recommendation to search engine bots / crawlers what they are allowed to index. At least all proper search engines like Google, Bing etc do follow that advise.

But it is voluntary and no protection against anything so others may not. It also has no impact on visitors viewing the full images. Real protection of folders can only be done server side using htaccess and/or permissions.

atomicmak

acrylian thanks again sir,
My intention is i have 1200x800 or some larger jpg for better viewing cuz of nature of my images and people use to see larger version.

So my thought was to allow engines to crawl original large files to their image network.

acrylian

Sure, if you like that.

Drawback might be that Google had rolled out a new image search engine layout some time ago (at least in some countries). That even makes it not necessary to visit the site itself since the full images are directly displayed in the search results. This has quite been criticized as being legally problematic (taking images out of context) and keeping sites from getting traffic (it is not active in Germany at least)

atomicmak

Thanks Acrylian my robots.txt been read by webmastertools @ google and indexing started.
Waiting for the effect as the whole gallery is changing with name so I suppose all the old links has to go off first and re-indexed and ranked by google which may take some weeks to reflect.

fingers crossed.