Better support for indexing by search engines

[bsvee]

Sorry if this is a duplicate request. It would be nice if I had a photo whose caption mentioned "Eiffel Tower" and had it show up in a Google search.

Barry
http://gallery.svee.org

[TranzNDance]

That's something that is up to Google. You can submit your site to be added to Google's search. You should read up on search engine optimisation to learn how to increase your chances of showing up in Google's results.

My gallery shows up in Google search without requiring additional "features" that you are requesting.

[Tarique Sani]

I have found that if you have your keywords and description proper then Google indexes CPG pages very well. Try http://www.google.com/search?q=tailor+bird+nest my site is right there in top 5 same is true for several other keywords from my site

[Joachim Müller]

among other things your google rank is based on relevance, the spider will visit less frequently if your page rank is low. Search engine optimization is a vast field that is discussed on many sites, there's no special setting you could possible make to get better results using coppermine. All "regular" hints on SEO apply to coppermine as well. Note that it's a myth that search engines shy away from database driven pages with dynamic content.

Joachim

[bsvee]

My gallery shows up at it's top level with a Google search. I was refering to the search engine's ability to drill down to photos and captions within an album. Although for months my gallery can be located with Google, it would appear that captions within the gallery cannot be resolved with Google.

[Tarique Sani]

@bsvee Google does drill down to upto 3 levels deep on my install - the link above is a proof of the same

[TranzNDance]

One of the results from my googled pages from my gallery goes quite deep:
Home > Nature > Animals > SF Zoo > animals eating

And this is with me blocking google images bot. So only regular google can spider my gallery.

[bsvee]

I'll take your word for it that Google will eventually drill down. From the log files I see Google accessing my web site and has done so for months. But again all of the searches that I do that resolve to my gallery only ever resolve to the top-most level, which I why I reached the conclusion that Google would never drill down. I've just tried a bunch of searches for things within my gallery but again I always hit the top level. Thank you all for your replies! 

bsvee
http://gallery.svee.org/

[bsvee]

I would like to accept recognition for the "bonehead award". When I did a Google search of type "site:" I found that Google was all over the place. In the words of Rosanne Rosanadanna, "Never mind" 

bsvee

[Joachim Müller]

you need guts to publicly say you were wrong, your posting is very helpfull for others. Look through all the threads on the support board where a coppermine supporter has been the last poster that are not labelled as "solved": I'd say 90% of all those who were looking for support just didn't manage to say "your suggestion worked" or "I was wrong". After all you found out about this on your own, so I can only applaud your posting - I don't think you deserve a "bonehead award", but respect.

Joachim

[LinkBliss]

That's all well and good, but there coul definitely be some enhancements to get better indexing by Google. I have had this site with lots of good inbound links --

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arainbowseeker%2Eus

That simply won't get indexed except for the top page. With some mod_rewrite all the pages could end in .html with no ? or & in the URL and it would all be indexed. Has someone done this already? Otherwise I will do it. 

Eric

[LinkBliss]

I already got it working somewhat.. not perfect but the url re-writes ought to allow it to get indexed deeper and faster.

=> http://www.rainbowseeker.us

I'm no expert at this, but here's the .htaccess file I came up with --
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule tn-(.*)--(.*).html thumbnails.php?album=$2
RewriteRule di-(.*)--(.*)-(.*).html displayimage.php?album=$2&pos=$3

Manipulating the thumbnail link was pretty straightforward --

Code:

           $removechars = array("<", ">", "--", ",", "!", ":", "-", ".", "?", "/", "\\", "#");
            $urltitle = str_replace(" ", "_", trim(str_replace($removechars, "", $album['album_title'])));

            $params = array('{COL_WIDTH}' => $column_width,

                '{ALBUM_TITLE}' => $album['album_title'],

                '{THUMB_CELL_WIDTH}' => $thumb_cell_width,

                //'{ALB_LINK_TGT}' => "thumbnails.php?album={$album['aid']}",
               '{ALB_LINK_TGT}' => "tn-".$urltitle."--{$album['aid']}.html",

I know this is not pretty, but here's the code for the displayimage links, I messed around with manipulating the caption string a bit --

Code:

               $removechars = array("<", ">", "--", ",", "!", ":", "-", "__", ".", "?", "/", "\\", "#", " ", "–", "&");
                //$urlcaption = str_replace(" ", "_", trim(str_replace($removechars, "", substr($thumb['caption'],0,5))));
                $capsplit = split("&ndash", $thumb['caption']);
                $urltitle = str_replace(" ", "_", trim(str_replace($removechars, "", substr(strip_tags($capsplit[0]),0,50))));
                $urltitle = trim(str_replace($removechars, "_", $urltitle));

                $params = array('{CELL_WIDTH}' => $cell_width,

                    //'{LINK_TGT}' => "displayimage.php?album=$aid$cat_link&pos={$thumb['pos']}",
                    '{LINK_TGT}' => "di-".$urltitle."--$aid-{$thumb['pos']}.html",

Check it out at http://www.rainbowseeker.us/gallery/  

Thanks,
Eric

[Rodinou]

If I find a lot of defaults on Coppermine, I can nothing to say about indexation !!!

So ...

Photos+Rouen > Sortons.Net is one the first page

Photos+Rouen+Muse > I'm the first

and for a lot of things ...

CPG is perfect, really. But url rewriting is good too ... maybe standard in so far versions

[TranzNDance]

CPG 1.4 has a plugin for search engine friendly URLs. It is included in coppermine as an introduction to plugins.

I don't think it should be standard in implementation. I don't know if I installed it, but I thought my gallery was broken when I saw the SEF URLs. My gallery does fine in search engines with the regular URLs. I would rather not use SEF, so it would better that it is an option rather than an imposition.

[kegobeer]

I agree with Thu.  I have images indexed on Google without any SEF URLs.  The way to get crawled and indexed is to be a popular site, which means visiting other sites and posting your website links.  Until you get some traffic, you don't get noticed.

[Tarique Sani]

I agree with Thu and Kego as well search for 'tarique' on Google and see however the so called SEF are indeed User friendly and can be done in ways outlined above

[Rodinou]

thanx for your answers

for me SEF url is perfect when I send to an artist it's url of his show

it's better to send > http://www.sortons.net/photos/moby-a-paris.htm (or something like that ...) that ... http://www.sortons.net/photos/thumbnails.php?=blallaallaa ...

Kego is right when he says SEF url is not for "few photos gallery traffic" ... but for me, with 4000 visits/day, it's a gadget which will be very practice

[Joachim Müller]

another reason why this can not be implemented as default option within coppermine is: it will only work on apache, and only if your webhost will alow mod_rewrite. As coppermine is meant to work on other platforms as well, SEF urls will not go into the core files. If you don't want to wait for cpg1.4.x (and the SEF plugin it contains), I suggest you take a look at the mods board, I think someone has started a thread about mod_rewrite and SEF urls there.

Joachim

[LinkBliss]

Aboslutely it should not "standard".. as people have said, it is infeasible.

However, take a look at the way Wordpress handles it. It is an option clearly in the configuration and it will automatically write the .htaccess file if it is writeable. It will also generate the htaccess settings and you can place it yourself.

You could go one step further and also write the ini file that would be needed on IIS, there is a cheap plug-in that is popular and similar (but just different enough) to mod_rewrite.

Eric Frost

[spiros71]

Does this hack work with 1.4.5? Which files have to be changed?