MAJOR problem with SEO... help! MAJOR problem with SEO... help!
 

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MAJOR problem with SEO... help!

Started by elwave, October 05, 2016, 08:46:17 PM

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elwave

October 05, 2016, 08:46:17 PM
Oh my my ._.

OK so here's the situation. I started my site in 2009 and have used Coppermine for the entire time. Up until about 2011 or so we had AWESOME traffic, mostly from the gallery. It was like a dream come true and the site was very successful.

But then... starting in around 2012 the popularity of the site randomly started to plummet. Our traffic went down and down and down and now we're at a fraction of where we once were... and I mean a fraction :(

But out of sheer chance and random googling last night I worked out that the problem is that Google is refusing to crawl the gallery. It's crawling our forum just fine and seems to go to the main page of the gallery, but doesn't really seem to go in any further and crawl the well over 12,000 pictures that we have. Bing is doing it, but Google isn't, and as the vast majority of our traffic was coming solely from Google image search... what on Earth is going on?

I have checked the robots.txt files and I think they're fine.

I would appreciate so much if someone could help me with this. The site means a lot to me and it's had such a great run and a fantastic community. Fixing this surely relatively small problem will I think totally reverse the trend of our traffic numbers and we'll be back on the way up again! Exciting :)

Thank you to anyone who wants to help,

Elwave

elwave

#1
October 05, 2016, 08:48:38 PM
Oh, I forgot to say. We are currently running version 1.5.28 but it's been upgraded many times in the past, and almost definitely a fair few in the time the traffic numbers have been dropping.

Currently I am doing a complete site backup and then I will upgrade to the latest version, but I am pretty confident that this won't affect our Google SEO success because previous upgrades didn't.

ron4mac

#2
October 06, 2016, 06:09:08 AM
The major problem with your gallery is that it's homepage is a malformed HTML document. Check it out at https://validator.w3.org by entering your gallery URL. Google is rejecting your site because of this problem.

I see it's first line as:
Code Select
<div style='top:47px;right:10px;position:absolute;color:white;font-size:12px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;'>Gallery viewed <strong>16,455,760</strong> times with <strong>12,274</strong> files</div><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

The "Gallery viewed 16,455,760 times" info is being misplaced ahead of the !DOCTYPE tag. It doesn't seem to be a problem specifically with your theme as viewing your site with the water_drop theme displays the same problem.

I suspect a plugin may be causing the problem.

elwave

#3
October 06, 2016, 05:15:25 PM
Oh darn... I made that broken bit of code myself! lol

Well... now I feel stupid!

I shall ask my web developer friend to take a peek and see what we can do about this. Ironic that I made that bit of text to show off the gallery popularity and then it tanked it!! Serves me right for boasting!

C'est la vie :)

Thank you very much for your time I really appreciate that. If this works I will happily start donating to Coppermine to say thank you.

ron4mac

#4
October 06, 2016, 08:28:58 PM
Your theme displays that sort of information down near the bottom of the page. The theme could be modified to display it (in a valid HTML way) at the top, if that's what you want.

elwave

#5
October 06, 2016, 10:06:21 PM
Yeah that would be great - I just thought the stats were impressive so I wanted to show them off! Silly really. And ironic that that is probably what did so much traffic damage!

Are you pretty confident that that is the problem?

ron4mac

#6
October 07, 2016, 12:20:47 AM
Quote from: elwave on October 06, 2016, 10:06:21 PM
Are you pretty confident that that is the problem?

Yes, I am.  Google is quite particular (unlike Bing) and will reject poorly formed websites.  And I think that is a good thing.  Sites that take effort with the integrity of their their website code may be more likely to take effort with their website content.

elwave

#7
October 07, 2016, 12:52:43 AM
Hm, true to a degree. But some people don't know much about SEO and it seems unfair to penalise them based on relatively arbitrary rules if their content is good.

Buuuut anyway... basically, right now, as long as Google is happy then I am happy! :)

So erm, is there an easy solution to this? Other than just removing the text... I mean, I could do that, and I will if I can't think of a way to put it there cleanly. If it's too much trouble to explain then it's OK and I can try to get a hand from a developer friend or work it out myself (but that might take a while as I'm not that great at this stuff yet! lol)

ron4mac

#8
October 07, 2016, 01:56:56 AM Last Edit: October 07, 2016, 05:10:28 PM by ron4mac
Quote from: elwave on October 07, 2016, 12:52:43 AM
So erm, is there an easy solution to this?

You definitely need to remove what you did so that your site is validly formatted HTML.  And your web developer friend should easily be able to modify your theme to move the statistics at the bottom of your page to the top.

As a leg-up for your developer friend:
Copy appropriate $template_ variables from include/themes.inc.php to your theme's theme.php file in order to reposition the location of the {STATISTICS} meta.

elwave

#9
October 07, 2016, 09:33:27 PM
Just for now I have put some (rather sloppy) placeholder text :)

http://sonichentai.net/gallery (NSFW!)

Is that OK now, do you think?

elwave

#10
October 07, 2016, 09:35:54 PM
I was also told that this might be an issue: http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=74840.0

I was planning to make that change anyway just in case. Do you think it's worth doing?

ron4mac

#12
October 07, 2016, 10:17:52 PM
Quote from: elwave on October 07, 2016, 09:35:54 PM
I was planning to make that change anyway just in case. Do you think it's worth doing?

Only if there is some reason why you need to have your full-size images accessible to bots.

elwave

#13
October 07, 2016, 11:47:46 PM
Yeah erm... I guess not particularly. I just want to make the gallery as googlebot friendly as I can, but I am currently thinking that intermediate images are probably enough.

And yeah look how many errors and warnings the forum has: https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsonichentai.net%2Fforum&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.3+http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2Fservices

WAY more than the gallery and that is indexed fine I think.

I mean... my sites are usually kinda sloppy. But I think that's passable as long as Google is happy with them :)

elwave

#14
October 08, 2016, 05:50:18 PM
I think that for now it's best for to me to be patient for maybe a week and see if I notice gallery images in Google Images and hopefully more traffic on my site!

Thank you very much for your time and advice - it was very helpful! :)

elwave

#15
October 11, 2016, 04:18:48 AM
Just wanted to add another note - I just enabled and checked the lighttpd access log and the Googlebots seem to be crawling the gallery just fine at the moment :)

elwave

#16
October 11, 2016, 04:24:56 AM
Just a sample line (IP hidden) :

11.22.33.44 www.sonichentai.net - [10/Oct/2016:22:22:15 +0300] "GET /gallery/displayimage.php?album=10&pid=10725 HTTP/1.1" 200 33421 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

biellebrunner

#17
October 22, 2016, 04:24:32 AM
Have you connected your site to Google's Webmaster tool?
If no, do so. If you've already done that, go to Crawl > URL parameters (google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters), and check if they're indexing all of the gallery's urls. Mine, for some reason, was ignoring any url with pid, album and uid. Set them as a parameter that specifies the content of the page, and then select for every url with those parameters to be crawled by Google.
That should help with indexing your gallery.

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