Need more text in banner at top of gallery

jimh

Here's one of my galleries:
https://gallery.jimhphoto.com/Minneapolis-photography/

I need room for more text in the banner at the top of the gallery. 2 lines isn't enough. Absolutely no one ever clicks on a "more" link, and Google needs to see visible text if you're going to have a prayer of getting indexed.

It's been a long time since I set this up. Having chosen a theme (I think mine is Osiris) am I locked in with regard to the size of this text block? To get more text space, do I need choose a whole different theme, or can I customize this one? Initially it doesn't seem I can just add a text block without scrambling the theme pretty badly.

Thanks people!

Hikin' Mike

Nevermind. I thought you were talking about the lightbox. Don't think you're going to have any luck with that one unless you turn off the gallery image.

Hikin' Mike

@jimh said:
Absolutely no one ever clicks on a "more" link, and Google needs to see visible text if you're going to have a prayer of getting indexed.

That's not true on both occasion. Search engines look by code, not eyes. Your text is there. Look at the source code.

jimh

Mike, I'll do that, I'll inspect the page code and try to convince myself that all that text is visible to the crawler. I have doubts. And I know that hidden text is ignored by Google and may even be a strike against the page.

I really believe though that no one clicks on 'more'. No way to settle that debate of course.

Right now Google Search Console shows me that my Gallery pages are being crawled, but not indexed - i.e. Google says "no thanks". I can't think of anything that might change that except the addition of more relevant text.

Hikin' Mike

Since you posted a specific gallery. All of your text is visible to me. Google has indexed that page: 'site:gallery.jimhphoto.com/'

A testing gallery with a lot of text (Lorem Ipsum) and when you inspect the code you can see it all:

jimh

I did look at that code and I'm going to tentatively say you're right although I think Google's crawling code is complex and devious. Today, it's the mobile version of a site that matters for indexing, so I need to find out how to inspect the mobile version of the site.

Yes "site:gallery.jimhphoto.com" does bring up this page, which is puzzling because it's at odds with Google Search Console. I recently solved a problem with my site maps, and Google began crawling my site again. Right now, my entire SM gallery - over 600 images isn't showing up as indexed at all, it seems to be in limbo. This particular gallery (Minneapolis photography) is the only page that's actually been crawled, and it shows as 'excluded'.

Hikin' Mike

There is no difference (in code) between desktop or mobile. I trust using site:gallery.jimhphoto.com more than Google's Crawled spreadsheet.

jimh

Sure there's a difference. Why else would Google be going on about "mobile first" crawling? They're saying they evaluate the mobile version of the site.
Maybe we're not talking about the same thing.