flapane
I had exactly the same problem with this plugin ..
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=74808.0The major error is that the rewrite allows for any text or characters in the url, and doesn't end anything.. Test it. You can basically write your correct url and add whatever you want in the url after the par # and it'll come up fine.
replace domain.com with skolaiimages.com
domain.com/stock/thumbnails-2-Camping-photos.html
correct.
Change it to, for example:
domain.com/stock/thumbnails-2-Caing-photos.htmltesta
shows the same page. Google would then go and try to find every url on the site with that kind of line as a prefix. I had thousands of 404s, and ended up having server usage issues, and on and on.
Another issue is that the plugin doesn't actually rewrite anything ... you can still go to your dynamic cpg urls and browse the albums that way. Which is what should happen.
I really wish someone would fix this so it works correctly. I'd definitely not recommend the plugin to anyone. I'm somewhat stuck with it now, as I have links everywhere to the 'sep friendly' urls, and on and on .. but I can assure you the plugin is most definitely NOT seo friendly. My site continues to go down on google rankings, and I'm about 95% sure all of the problems lie with this plugin.
This page here (static html page)
domain.com/alaska/wrangell-st-elias-photos.html
WAY outranks this one (cpg)
domain.com/stock/thumbnails-25-Wrangell-St-Elias-National-Park-Photos.html
I've also tested with wordpress
This page:
domain.com/alaska-polar-bear-photos/
WAYYYYY outranks this one
domain.com/stock/thumbnails-122-Polar-Bear-Photos.html
Yet that cpg page is older, has many more images, and so on. Both are in the site map, linked to correctly, and so on. The wordpress galleries outrank the cpg pages on my site virtually every time.
My site was loved by google before these kinds of problems started up. It sees double content, and bad urls and so on and this hurts the site.
Why not a plugin that allows the user to set a url path when s/he creates a gallery? And then it's set, with any incorrect url returning a 404 (which is what should happen). It could even allow full size images to be manually set as urls as well, but really, I think for most folks, just rewriting the main album is what's most important.
One of the reasons this stuff happens a lot now is because google crawls and looks for any url it finds, even truncated urls that are not actual links. Many site aggregators now truncated the tex of a url, and so google will look for yoursite.com/albums/whatever-the-nam.... instead of whatever-the-name-of-the-page-is.html
And with this plugin, those do not return 404s, but google crawls them, and sees duplicate content.
I'm not a coder, so I can't begin to fix this. But here a couple of rules I wrote trying to solve the problem on the backdoor, and return 410s (no impact on server load)
ErrorDocument 410 "File no longer exists"
This was suggested but didn't fix it.
# RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htmlhttp\:\/ - [G,L]
I believe this below is what actually fixed it
RedirectMatch 410 ^/stock/thumbnails-18-Whitetail-Deer-Photos.htmlhttp:/
And here are 2 others I added
RedirectMatch 410 ^/stock/thumbnails-53-Alaska-Stock-Phot/
RedirectMatch 410 ^/stock/thumbnails-106-Juvenile-Bald-Eagle-Photos.html/
I'll reiterate, to anyone wanting to use the plugin, I advise against it.
Cheers
Carl