Well, I took out the redirect, I fixed everything I could think to fix.  I got a person at Google to review my case (though it is their policy to not say anything in response) and still my Zenfolio subdomain prints.stephen.com is black listed by Google.  Just linking to it hurts the Page Rank of my main site at www.stephen.com.

I think I've found the problem!

On every page of prints.stephen.com, Zenfolio has added the tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

This is NOT the case on:

http://www.thompsondigitalimage.com/

which has been given as an example of a Zenfolio site which is successful on Google.

In other words, Zenfolio is SPECIFICALLY telling Google to NOT index my site and this is MY site in particular, not all sites.

I think you can imagine that as a paying member, I find this REALLY annoying!

stephenlinhart:

 

I think I've found the problem!

On every page of prints.stephen.com, Zenfolio has added the tag:

 

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

This is NOT the case on:

http://www.thompsondigitalimage.com/

which has been given as an example of a Zenfolio site which is successful on Google.

 

In other words, Zenfolio is SPECIFICALLY telling Google to NOT index my site and this is MY site in particular, not all sites.

 

I think you can imagine that as a paying member, I find this REALLY annoying!

This is troubling to say the least. While I did not find a 'robots' entry in the source for my Zenfolio home page, I find difficult to understand why Zenfolio might take such action for a paid site in particular. If any support staff is listening I'd sure appreciate an explanation. It would be really nice to have this issue behind us.

George Jones

I should apologize to Zenfolio!

I found the problem and it is a setting in Access control.  I don't remember setting it, and I haven't found out yet what the default is, but it is in Search and Metadata and is called "Include in Zenfolio site-wide search results". Underneath this it now says "(also can be found by public search engines)".

On my site this was off on all pages.  I have changed it to on.

I wish the ZF staff would have advised us on that setting earlier.  They never mentioned it when responding to my emails on the subject or in this thread.  That could have avoided a lot of headaches!!

Bill,

I found this for Stephen earlier.

Go to the Organizer, look at your Access Controls on the right. Beside "Search:" what does it say?

If you edit your Access Controls "Search" field to Private or Not Allowed, you will get this added to your page. <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

If you set it to Public, it removes that and allows the Search engines a better chance of finding your pages.

It's still not perfect, but ZF is supposedly working on better SEO and I hope they have it out in the next release.

Hi Bill -

Check Search and Metadata in Access Control and let us know what you find.  It's probably as simple as setting it to "Include Zenfolio site-wide search results."

It would have been nice if someone at Zenfolio had pointed this out to us at some point.  But still, it's nice to see that there seems to be a setting.

firedog -- thanks so much!! It sounds like you are the reason for getting an answer to this question.  I just wish the ZF staff would have been as helpful!!

stephenlinhart:

I should apologize to Zenfolio!

I found the problem and it is a setting in Access control.  I don't remember setting it, and I haven't found out yet what the default is, but it is in Search and Metadata and is called "Include in Zenfolio site-wide search results". Underneath this it now says "(also can be found by public search engines)".

On my site this was off on all pages.  I have changed it to on.

Hooray! Nice to find resolution without blowing a gasket. I'm going to check my settings to see if I'm shooting myself in the foot! My day is going to be better now for sure. I hope yours will as well!

George Jones

I had the same problem as you, Stephen.  I just made the change and hopefully that takes care of the issue.  Thanks for your really helpful posts on this subject.

Did the "Include in Zenfolio site-wide search results" always include the "(also can be found by public search engines)" parathetical on the Access Control page?  I don't remember always seeing it there. 

Regardless, Stephen and firedog -- thanks again!

No problem!

FYI -  it still might take Google a few weeks to index your site. It depends on how often they crawl your site and how many pages they crawl on your site.

I have not made any effort to get Google to index my site. But it has index my homepage nonetheless. It has indexed one of the photos in one of my galleries, but none of the galleries themselves have been indexed. It is very strange. Oh well, it is not a big deal. If being in Google search resluts was so important to me I would have stayed at PBase. But still, Zenfolio should do a better job with search engines than this, I think.