Hi guys.
This should be moved to Modifications/Add-Ons/Hacks.
Finally, google spidered my gallery and I have some information in the webmaster tools.
Link text is one of the most important SEO properties beside title and h1 tags. The top most link texts google found for my gallery are:
- return to start
- see previous file
- see next file
- http www htbackdrops com v2 displayimage php pid
- return to the thumbnail page
Wow. That is so generic and meaningless. These have a major impact on the ranking. The links are generated in the intermediate page navigation (default theme).
As far as my gallery goes the most important information google should know are the image titles. I still want the links to be "see next file", .. as this is what they do, but have significant keywords with it. (One could think of eleminating the "see next file" text alltogether for even better results ...).
So I took the function
theme_html_img_nav_menu from
include/themes.inc.php copied it into my
theme.php and applied the folowing changes:
// Add line to top
global $CURRENT_ALBUM_DATA;
// Change line
$start_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['go_album_start'];
// To
$start_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['go_album_start'] . " ({$pic_data[$start]['title']})";
// Change line
$prev_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['prev_title']";
// To
$prev_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['prev_title'] . " ({$pic_data[$prev]['title']})";
// Change line
$end_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['go_album_end'];
// To
$end_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['go_album_end'] . " ({$pic_data[$end]['title']})";
// Change line
$next_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['next_title'];
// To
$next_title = $lang_img_nav_bar['next_title'] . " ({$pic_data[$next]['title']})";
// Change line
$meta_nav .= "<link rel=\"up\" href=\"$thumb_tgt\" title=\"".$lang_img_nav_bar['thumb_title']. "\"/>" . $LINEBREAK;
// To
$meta_nav .= "<link rel=\"up\" href=\"$thumb_tgt\" title=\"".$lang_img_nav_bar['thumb_title']. " ({$CURRENT_ALBUM_DATA['title']})". "\"/>" . $LINEBREAK;
This way the image titles and album titles are propagated much more efficent imho.
Many say that SEF URLs like
www.bla.com/IMAGE_TITLE.html would be so important, but I think this easy hack has an impact atleast as high as SEF URLs.
What is left as top link text is "http www htbackdrops com v2 displayimage php pid". This also is found on the intermediate page in the file information. It could be a good thing to remove the link from the URL text and just leave it as it is. Instead have the image title linked to the intermediate page (don't know how google treats links to the same page a link is on though) or maybe the image (fullsize) itself. This should be done at the top of the file information box, so that hopefully google starts to recognize the important content from there on.
I came to this conclusion because the description google shows for my intermediate pages all start with
URL: http://www.htbackdrops.com/v2/displayimage.php?pid=xxx. Favorites: Add to Favorites. Download Full Size Link: Save this link or open ...
(if there is no image description given; through meta tag or beneath the image).
This will give the image title even more importance.
The last thing I did to tune up the image title and make the filename less important is a little hack in
functions.inc.php// Change line
$thumb_list[$i]['image'] = '<img src="' . $pic_url . '" class="image" ' . $image_size['geom'] . ' border="0" alt="' . $row['filename'] . '" title="' . $pic_title . '" />';
// TO
$thumb_list[$i]['image'] = '<img src="' . $pic_url . '" class="image" ' . $image_size['geom'] . ' border="0" alt="' . $row['title'] . '" title="' . $pic_title . '" />';
This does change the image alt tag on the thumbnailpage and will hopefully give other keywords than "jpg" a higher rating. (Has been discussed in some other threats here but I don't have links now).
These are the most significant changes for now. I will give google some time to update the index and check the results of these small modifications. (I'm lucky: Google spiders about 3,5k of my pages daily).
I hope this helps some of you (and me
to get your ranking up quite a bit.
I'll post again when I come up with further changes like an update for the file information box on the intermediate pages as mentioned above.
Cheers,
Jayhunter
P.S. Gallery at
Home Theater Backdrops - Media Backdrops for your Media Center