X3Photo Gallery Forums

anytime732 · 22 Apr 2009, 17:46

hi karl,

ive just done some digging on my site and although i have html gallery enabled the the admin console, i cant seem to access it, every time i try it redirects to the flash. there are only two reason i can think of this .....

1) i ave the gallery embedded? would this cause this i dont know?

2) each of my individual pages is in its own folder with the html page named index so links are pointed to "www.sherwoodsfabrics.co.uk/welcome" which is actuall pointed to "www.sherwoodsfabrics.co.uk/welcome/index.html".

these are the only things i can thing of,

your thoughts would be greatfuly recieved.

Nick · 23 Apr 2009, 04:44

Your best bet is to edit imagevue/templates/index.gallery.phtml to resemble your index.html, then it will work:

http://www.sherwoodsfabrics.co.uk/fabri ... d%20Greys/

anytime732 · 23 Apr 2009, 09:19

pain,

sorry for being a little dumb but what do you mean by editting index.gallery.phtml ive left this as default, so what must i add to it?

24 Apr 2009, 05:02

anytime732 wrote:ok i understand so far, i guess my next question would be is there anyway of getting search engines to see the text in the descriptions of the images?

That is exactly what we will be trying to do for the next release, based on the suggestion from markam24 that google doesn't index URLs ending with *.jpg. If we fix that, not only will it index the page, but it will index the page based on the data on the page, including the title and description.

Before this would even work for you though, you need to make your HTML gallery visible to google. The reason your HTML gallery is not visible to google, is because you have embedded it into a custom website. Now, your HTML gallery is here:
www.sherwoodsfabrics.co.uk/fabrics/index.php?p=html

In the default galleries, like our demo gallery, there is a hidden link to the sibling html site:

Optionally, you can view the HTML gallery page instead:<br />
&raquo; <a href="?p=html">HTML gallery</a>

I checked your gallery at sherwoodfabrics, and you have this:

<div id="imagevue">
      <script type="text/javascript"> 
//<![CDATA[ 
var flashVars = { 
}; 
swfobject.embedSWF("imagevue/imagevue2.swf", "imagevue", "950", "700", "8.0.0", "imagevue/expressInstall.swf", flashVars, {allowScriptAccess: 'always', allowFullScreen: true, bgcolor: '333333'}, {id: 'imagevue', name: 'imagevue'}); 
// ]]> 
  </script>
    </div>

Perhaps you should change it to this, adding a link to your HTML gallery similar to the default imagevue x2 gallery container file.

<div id="imagevue">

<h1>Oops! - This page requires javascript -</h1><br />
Please enable javascript in your browser and reload page.<br /><br />
Optionally, you can view the HTML gallery page instead:<br />
<a href="index.php?p=html">HTML gallery</a>

<script type="text/javascript"> 
//<![CDATA[ 
var flashVars = { 
}; 
swfobject.embedSWF("imagevue/imagevue2.swf", "imagevue", "950", "700", "8.0.0", "imagevue/expressInstall.swf", flashVars, {allowScriptAccess: 'always', allowFullScreen: true, bgcolor: '333333'}, {id: 'imagevue', name: 'imagevue'}); 
// ]]> 
  </script>
    </div>

After doing this, google will eventually index your HTML gallery once it re-crawls your site.

anytime732 wrote:ps. is it me or are things getting a little hostile in here?

Nothing hostile here. Just trying to explain that there are some things we can improve to a certain extent, some things you can do(to make your html gallery visible to google), and some things which simply can't be achieved unfortunately.

anytime732 · 25 Apr 2009, 07:20

ok, now ive made the chnages to the html page where the gallery is embeded..

i gues its just a case of wait n see...... ill post back if anything changes.

thanks for your hlp

hingis · 01 May 2009, 03:00

i also did the same thing, i wish it will help,
thank you..

anytime732 · 12 May 2009, 10:39

hi,

i have noticed since doing the above search engines are really looking more into my site.

i do however have one question which is currently the links the the crawlers find link to the html gallery , i was wondering if there was anyway to force them to link back to the gallery which is embeded in the site?

thansk in advance

12 May 2009, 12:48

anytime732 wrote:i do however have one question which is currently the links the the crawlers find link to the html gallery , i was wondering if there was anyway to force them to link back to the gallery which is embeded in the site?

Good question - Unfortunately, I don't think we can solve this in any easy manner. Google is "organic", meaning it indexes pages and data based on the content of the links it crawls. Now if we changed those links and pointed them to the flash gallery, it wouldn't index them properly.

There would only be a really dirty "workaround" for that, which involved linking to a page which included both the HTML image page, AND the SWF gallery. The html image page would be hidden in a container, made invisible to the visitors, but still fooling the search engines to think the data is there. The visitor would only see the SWF gallery, which has little or no impact towards the search engines.

anytime732 · 13 May 2009, 03:21

whats say it to the really dirty workaround then??

but seriously, ealeir in this forum i think is was markam24 that suggested removing the extension from the end of the galleru url's , maybe some time in the future this could be taken into consideration?

Nick · 13 May 2009, 04:52

Is there some scientific proof that it will affect search engine friendliness? Do you have a link? I couldn't find anything about that.

markam24 · 13 May 2009, 14:20

I have no proof that removing the extensions will make them "google-able".

It was just an idea. It made sense to me that google would attempt to treat a URL ending as .jpg as an image, not a web page. Keep in mind I have limited knowledge re: SEO!

I have, however, brought the issue up in the google webmaster forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/W ... 080f&hl=en

Maybe someone there will have an idea -;)

markam24 · 13 May 2009, 17:36

So far nobody on the The Google Webmaster forum can say for certain one way or the other.

The URLs are not erroring out as per my host logs.

I've crawled them with the GSiteCrawler and it includeds the Image Page URLs in the site map (which I submitted to google months ago).

Google WILL find and report the images themselves (through Image Search / not Web Search) when I have hot linking disabled on my site. It just won't report the pages they are hosted within or display those pages in web search.

So.... I'm sticking to my theory -;) Google doesn't index the image pages for web search results 'cause the .jpg extension confuses them.

No proof though. Just a theory.

14 May 2009, 05:05

I read the post - Thanks a lot for researching this and keeping us updated!

markam24 · 15 May 2009, 16:20

Not sure if this will help, but...

I resubmitted a sitemap created by GSiteCrawler to Google. It documented 190 URLs. For URLs not indexed, this is the error according to Google:

- URLs not followed
When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL. Help HTTP Error:
URL:
Problem detected on: 302 (Moved temporarily) Help
http://www.MYSITE.com/?p=html&path=http ... ?p=gallery
May 15, 2009

(yes, i edited the domain name within the URL to read "mysite")

Nick · 19 May 2009, 04:57

There shouldnt be urls like this, maybe there is a bug in sitemap somewhere? Maybe you could provide a link to your site or describe how to check it myself?

sitemap of x2? ways to get search engines to see it????48 postsPage 3 of 4