Hello all

First of all despite the recent security issues (turns out my .htaccess was hacked and someone had added malware in there) I just want to say what a great product this is.

I have customised it here and it looks really cool: http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto

I have a question about the robots.txt and what i should be excluding in there?

Basically I want google to idex all my images. I want them to appear in the image search results and for them to be indexed.

At the moment my robots.txt file is:

Sitemap: http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *

Disallow: /zenphoto/themes/
Disallow: /zenphoto/zp-core/
Disallow: /zenphoto/zp-data/
Disallow: /zenphoto/page/search/
Disallow: /zenphoto/uploaded/

Is this correct to meet my requirements?

Another thing is that in google webmasters is saying there are 326 files restricted by the robots.txt file:

http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-june-2011&i=image_15.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011
http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-july-2011&i=1-114-.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011
http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-june-2011&i=image_23.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011
http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-june-2011&i=image_30.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011
http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-july-2011&i=1-115-.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011
http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/zp-core/full-image.php?a=boat-party-july-2011&i=1-73-.jpg&q=75&wmk=!
URL restricted by robots.txt Nov 20, 2011

When i click on some of the restricted ones it says:

Notice: class-album detected an invalid folder name: Boat-Party-July-2011. in /homepages/41/d375827504/htdocs/Boat Party London/zenphoto/zp-core/class-album.php on line 76

Notice: Bad album object parameter to newImage(1-83-.jpg) in /homepages/41/d375827504/htdocs/Boat Party London/zenphoto/zp-core/class-image.php on line 34

Fatal error: Call to a member function getWatermark() on a non-object in /homepages/41/d375827504/htdocs/Boat Party London/zenphoto/zp-core/functions-basic.php on line 532

Any idea how I can fix this?

`Sitemap: http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/sitemap.xml`
If your sitemap is located there that would be correct. (The one Zenphoto can generate using the sitemap plugin would be in another place.

Ther robots.txt looks good so far (you should also disallow /backup). That the links are blocked is correct as you blocked all links to /zp-core. Those links are protected full image links (to add watermarks for example). There is no need to index these actually. The real full images itself are within /albums and the respective sub folder (the actual albums).

Hi Thanks for the reply

Not sure what you mean by:

Sitemap: http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/sitemap.xml
If your sitemap is located there that would be correct. (The one Zenphoto can generate using the sitemap plugin would be in another place.

The sitemap is there.

I will add /backbup too.

Is it worth using the ZP sitempa plugin? What benefit will it add?

Thanks for your help and speedy response.

The benefit of using the Zenphoto sitemap plugin is that it creates a sitemap for all items it manages (actually a sitemap index with extra sitemaps for images, album and Zenpage news articles, pages or categories).

Try it out.

Acrylian

I have just found out that if you restrict direcories being listed via .htaccess then you dont need to add them to your robots.txt files as above as the search engines follow the rules in .htaccess

Is that correct.

If you go to http://www.boatpartylondon.co.uk/zenphoto/backup/ the directory is not listed as i restricted this via .htaccess with Options -Indexes

Yes. The difference is bascially that htaccess settings are server configuration while the robots.txt settings are more wishes or recommendations. That all big search engine crawlers do honor those is more or less voluntary. So if you really want to protect something do it via permissions and/or htaccess.