Nextgen Gallery not in google

@bigg1es – We have several articles on our site to do with SEO and NextGEN Gallery, I would suggest reviewing them for additional ideas on how best to get your images “indexed” on Google et al.

Here’s a search link: https://www.nextgen-gallery.com/?s=SEO

Thanks!

– Cais.

Hi, thanks, I read that. Most of it is about SEO optimisation but my problem is not coming top of google but getting into google at all.

The article advised the use of Yoast SEO which I have installed. This included a site map which may help, but the site map only lists the two static pages. My gallery consists of lots of sub galleries which were not identified by the site map.

One interesting tool and perhaps a clue, the yoast allows me to bring up googles cache of my website. Google has cached the text on the album pages but non of the images. Furthermore if you click on where an image should be in the google cache it comes up with the error “The requested content cannot be loaded”.

Non of the full sized images, with their descriptions are indexed.

I suspect something is blocking google from seeing or saving the images. Its not my robots.text which allows everything bar one directory, so have you any suggestions?

@bigg1es – There is nothing in NextGEN Gallery that would “block” Google indexing your site, if you are seeing what looks to be that then it may be elsewhere you have to investigate further.

The articles on our site are currently all we have to offer on SEO which directly relates to indexing in general.

Thanks!

– Cais.

The best thing to do is simply login into your GOOGLE WEBMASTER Control panel and that will give you enough info on what’s going on.

You will find out which pages/sitemaps were indexed by Google and you can always try to resubmit your domain.

I am not sure if NextGEN is responsible for not having your links in google but this is one sure way to start to trace the issue.

@kd35 – Thanks for sharing your idea!

– Cais.

Thanks for advice. I am currently running some experiments. I added one of the images to my html home page as a hot link to the directory where my nextgen images are. After a just a few days it shows as a text search under the specific phrase I used as alt tags and visible image description, although its not yet in the image search results. I will leave it over Christmas, if its not listed it will indicate a problem crawling my image folder.

I will be doing tests and making changes over Christmas.

Thanks for all the help.

@bigg1es – Thanks for the follow-up.

– Cais.

Google can be lazy and will not necessarily navigate all the way down to an image.

You want to make it simple for Google to find your images. Ideally your sitemap plugin should include the pages with the thumbnails on plus the image page itself. Maybe by now someone has produced an image sitemap plugin?

What I did was to setup a cron job to find every image file on my site. Then I edit that to produce a wordpress page of links to all the images. That seems to work well.

The results of my experiment are in.

I added a copy of one of the images to my main HTML web page. This image was linked from the directory where my next gen gallery images are stored. I added suitable text and alt text.

The result is after 5 days, the image shows in google image search when you search for the specific phrase I used for the description and alt tags.

This tells me there is nothing wrong with the image or with the folder structure where it is stored on my server.

At the same time I added the above photo to my home page I added prominent links to the individual galleries on Next Gen. Non of the next Gen content is showing in google image search. Not even the Thumbnails :o(

I am new to wordpress, so it could be that google is slow to index anything word press or it could be specific to Nextgen gallery. For my next experiment, I will install word press on my UK website and install an alternative gallery and see what happens.

@toshi Yoshida – Thanks for sharing … and welcome back to the forums!

– Cais.

@bigg1es – Thanks, again, for the feedback and experiments.

This information could become quite useful going forward.

– Cais.

I have been further experimenting but have still not got any of my images in google.

Immediatly after the above post, 2 weeks ago, I added Word Press to my english language website. I installed an alternative popular gallery and the results are … the same, no images are indexed in google, not even when you search for a very specific phrase which is the image description and probably the only image with that description on the net.

Some more clues. I have an seo plugin on my German website where nextgen is installed. It says SEO is very bad with the following problems:-

The text contains only one word

no description is given

The focus keyword doesn’t appear in the first paragraph of the copy. Make sure the topic is clear immediately

The site contains no alt attributes

There are a load more but its already clear whats happening. This SEO plugin is not reading the image descriptions, nor is it navigating through the nextgen gallery structure ( Main gallery > Sub gallery>sub gallery>image). If thats whats happening with the seo plugin , then that is probably what is happeing with google.

My website is not a traditional blog, its a pure photo gallery so the only important text is the image description text. I have a few non wordpress php galleries where the image description is taken from the meta data and is used as the visible description of the image on the web page. The difference is this appears to be readable by search engines whereas with nextgen search engines are not reading image descriptions?

Any suggestions?

Currently I only see two options, either write an image description by hand for every image as some sort of blog post or site map, or B give up and look for a different type of gallery.

I’m very curious as to why there is a difference in search engine behaviour in nextgen vs a typical php gallery. Are the full sized image pages generated in java? I note they have no individual page URL and no alt text with mouse over.

Talking of mouse over, I discovered another interesting clue.

On my top level gallery and the sub gallery, there is nothing shown when you hover over an image. However if you go to the lowest level ( Top Gallery>sub-gallery>gallery with pics) where the actual individual images are , then here mouse over shows the image file name. Now googling for one of these very specific file names ( luftbild_weimar_jc31739 ) brought up a link to nextgen gallery. Clearly google has read the mouse over but not really understood it.

For now I am going to chenge my gellery names to something more descriptive rather than one word town / region names.

Is there any way of altering or changing the mouse over alt text? Ideally I would like it to show a gallery description for high level galleries and the full image description for individual images.

@bigg1es,

When I started using NextGEN it took a LONG time till Google found any of my full size images – pretty sure it was more than 4 weeks!

What NextGen pages are in your sitemap?
Your albums and galleries need to be there. From memory I think going back a long time (so can’t guarantee this) when I used Yoast SEO those pages were not included in its sitemaps for my site?

Google will usually pick up real pages and posts from WordPress quite easily. Plugin generated pages i.e. those not visible under your pages and posts tabs often tend to be slower to be found or missed for some reason.

You need to add as much content as practical/sensible to your album and gallery pages.

(1) NextGEN:
Use the NextGEN Alt & Title Text / Description fields to add text especially keywords for each image. Also add Tags. I only use the caption shortcode [nggallery id=nn template=caption] that way each thumbnail has some text displayed with it. I don’t know if without template caption the caption text is still in your page source and therefore crawlable by Google? You image names should be keywords eg. mine are of the format “artist-name title-of-work”.

(2) WordPress:
As the NextGEN album and gallery pages appear as real WordPress pages on my website I edit them to add additional content to the page. I also use whatever additional input fields my SEO plugin provides for on those pages eg. meta descriptions.

Its all about bulking up your content on the album and gallery pages and giving Google clues (keywords) on what your page is about.

One thing I should add. Even today after using NextGEN for several years many of my full size images are not findable on Google whether using text or image searches. While that’s curious, I don’t find it an issue as Google likes the thumbnails on the albums and galleries pages and those pages usually rank on page 1 for my chosen keywords.

Regards,
Mike.

Hi, thanks for the tips.

I have just seen how to edit the alt descriptions in the nextgen settings. The default was the image title which although it had keywords they were spaced with underscores _ . I have swapped that on a few test images for a full description. they are pictures of individual buildings and as aerial photos of these are rare , if it works they should show up on google.

The bad news is the other similar gallery I tried had as a default that the alt tags were taken from the iptc description field and despite a lovley full description on mouse over, those images too are not showing in google.

Now I realise I can add all sorts of things tailored to each individual image but I was trying to find a gallery that takes all the info from the iptc title and description so that I do not have to make individual edits on gallery software. Im dealing with large volumes of images, currently 80,000 and by having everything taken from within the image it will facilitate future upgrades / changes in software / disaster recovery etc .

I can see that sitemaps are key to this problem. I have just the basic site map covering my nextgen content and non at all for my main html and php website. My normal website is heavilly interlinked and does not really need a sitemap, bots crawl all over it frequently. To speed up the nextgen crawl, I had already added some links to my most popular plain html web pages so google should have crawled it by now, probably many times over. I started my nextgen gallery nearly 2 months ago. Normally google loves my work and when I am working on my normal php gallery, images start to show in a few days, certainly within a couple of weeks, and thats without any special attempt to link them to key pages.

Wow. 80,000 you’d certainly need it automated as much as possible.

However, whatever you use you’ll still need to rename your image and possibly add a description (aka caption aka title) if that’s not inherited from the image name. In NextGEN it may be the album/gallery (thumbnail) page that’s important. If you can get someone to the gallery they’ll find the image.