SEO Problems? Sometimes It’s Too Obvious

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 24 of July , 2008 at 8:29 pm

Search engine optimization can be a strange business sometimes. A forum thread on WebProForum caught my eye today. Portucuenta started the thread asking why his images hadn’t been indexed by Google. He has 16000 images yet only 19 have been indexed.

There was a lot of advice provided including using Google Image Labeler. Why this advice I have no idea since Image Labeler is a toy to get users to label images already in the database, not on your own site. Most advised using basic search engine optimization techniques such as alt tags and waiting for Google to crawl.

One writer went to the trouble of looking at the robots.txt and advised removing all of the disallow’s. This is not necessarily the best option. Search engine optimization relies in part on meta tags and robots files to tell the search engines where they can and cannot go. Removing all the disallow’s is not the answer. However, the robots file did reveal some interesting info.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /class/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /include/
Disallow: /install/
Disallow: /kernel/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /templates_c/
Disallow: /themes/

Perhaps by removing the ‘disallow: /images/’ from the robots file may just be enough to encourage the spiders to visit and start indexing the images. It may not work; however, when it comes to search engine optimization problems, the solution is so simple and obvious that we all miss it.

                      Category: SEO                      

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