Joomla + phoca SEO issues

Question

I'm encoutering a problem in one of my sites that most recent keyword of my site is "jpg" in Google Webmaster tools. I'm using Joomla 1.5.9 and phoca for gallery. How to prevent image extenstions to be indexed by robots?

BTW: respective gallery folders are blocked in robots

Answer 1

From Google Webmaster Central's "Prevent your images appearing in Google search results":

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

If you wanted to block specific image types from Google, you could use this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /*.jpeg$

Other search engines don't offer such control, but most will will honour robots.txt files, so blocking directories of images (i.e. the gallery URL and the directory storing the images) is the way to go.

You may also wish to disable hotlinking of images to prevent people linking to your image files directly from other websites, which could cause them to be picked up by Google et al.

If you've done all that and you're still seeing your images in Google's results, you might like to check that the robots.txt file is in your root directory, and that it's publicly accessible in your browser.

Answer 2

The keyword may appear in links to your site. You could password protect the gallery folder and then put the password on your home page, so that humans can read it and get in. You could use javascript to create the links to the gallery folders. However now that they've been crawled it will take a while for the robots to stop trying to access them, and remove the pages from their indices.

Answer 3

Honestly, it doesn't matter that much if "jpg" appears more than any other term on your web site. I have the words ago, search and votes among the top keywords on a site but it doesn't prevent it ranking for other terms. Furthermore, if your site is image-based (e.g. a gallery or wallpaper site) then ranking for "jpg" may actually be beneficial.

Having said that, it could be indicative of a problem that URLs or other nonsense text is on the page instead of links to those URLs. This wouldn't necessarily harm your ranking but it could detract from the main content. If you post your site we could take a better look.