hidden galleries showing on various electronic mediums

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

When I surfed my site on my phone, two of the first three galleries that showed up were two that are "Unlisted." Same thing when I use the SmugMug gallery application on Facebook.

How can I be sure folks aren't seeing galleries they shouldn't?

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

Ok, another thing. When I have posted images here in Dgrin that I don't want to be viewable anymore and I turn off external links in that gallery, they are still in the original threads upon refresh.

Eeek!

Andy · August 13, 2008

1) you're logged in so you'll see the unlisted galleries

2) you're photos are cached - clear (completely and fully empty!) your browser cache

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

yikes.
I'm not trying to be paranoid, but I'm finding all these things I didn't use to find when I googled myself just now.

for instance, all of my personal shots are hidden from navigation in a category called family. no one but my family knows how to get to these galleries.

But now when you google me the link to the parent category is the second hit.

I do not want people to be finding these photos when they're looking for me!!!!!

Should I delete the family category and then make a vanity URL to sidestep? Or is Google now seeing EVERYTHING?

Andy · August 13, 2008

urbanaries wrote:

I do not want people to be finding these photos when they're looking for me!!!!!

Hi, I already answered

Please, log out, clear your cache. Better yet, use a 2nd browser

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

Andy wrote:

1) you're logged in so you'll see the unlisted galleries

2) you're photos are cached - clear (completely and fully empty!) your browser cache

When I'm logged in to what? Facebook? My phone browser doesn't allow me to authenticate.

And I did clear data (CTRL+Sh+Del) in FF, is there another way to do it completely and fully?

Andy, there are two issues going on here:
1. galleries that are now set to external links off (just looked in IE, and they're off!!! YAY thanks)
2. categories that aren't navigable but contain "public" galleries. Google is putting this un-navigable category at the top of my rankings. My family browses my behind the scenes photos without knowing gallery URLs or passwords because they know the parent URL.

Andy · August 13, 2008

Lynne, where is a photo showing that shouldn't be? Link to a post/thread/page somewhere?

What google search are you using? Give it to us so we can try and replicate

What galleries are being shown?

jfriend · August 13, 2008

urbanaries wrote:

I'm not trying to be paranoid, but I'm finding all these things I didn't use to find when I googled myself just now.

for instance, all of my personal shots are hidden from navigation in a category called family. no one but my family knows how to get to these galleries.

But now when you google me the link to the parent category is the second hit.

I do not want people to be finding these photos when they're looking for me!!!!!

Should I delete the family category and then make a vanity URL to sidestep? Or is Google now seeing EVERYTHING?

Hiding a category with CSS does not hide anything from Google or even some web interfaces (like the iPhone interface). The category and the subsequent links to your galleries are right there in your HTML page and Google sees them. It probably doesn't even know you've hidden them with CSS. That is not the proper way to hide things from a search engine.

If you don't want Google to find your galleries, then you can do any or all of the following:

Make the galleries unlisted. They will not appear in any publicly accessible web page so Google will not every find them unless you link to them from some other web page.
Configure the galleries so that search robots are not supposed to index them. Go to customize gallery for each gallery and set Hello World and Hello Smuggers to No.
Put a password on the galleries that you tell your family. This will keep all crawlers out of the galleries. If you use the same password on all your family galleries, viewers will only have to enter it once.

Now that they are already indexed, you can't just make them unlisted and be sure that they will fall out of the Google index. You can either put a password on them or re-upload them into new galleries and delete the old galleries. Google will discover that the things it had previously indexed are no longer accessible and remove them from it's index.

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

Thank you John for your complete answer. Even though I haven't linked to that category in my CSS, I think I get it now. Thanks so much!!!'

Lynne

jfriend wrote:

Hiding a category with CSS does not hide anything from Google or even some web interfaces (like the iPhone interface). The category and the subsequent links to your galleries are right there in your HTML page and Google sees them. It probably doesn't even know you've hidden them with CSS. That is not the proper way to hide things from a search engine.

If you don't want Google to find your galleries, then you can do any or all of the following:
Make the galleries unlisted. They will not appear in any publicly accessible web page so Google will not every find them unless you link to them from some other web page.

Configure the galleries so that search robots are not supposed to index them. Go to customize gallery for each gallery and set Hello World and Hello Smuggers to No.

Put a password on the galleries that you tell your family. This will keep all crawlers out of the galleries. If you use the same password on all your family galleries, viewers will only have to enter it once.

Now that they are already indexed, you can't just make them unlisted and be sure that they will fall out of the Google index. You can either put a passwor do on them or re-upload them into new galleries and delete the old galleries. Google will discover that the things it had previously indexed are no longer accessible and remove them from it's index.

Andy · August 13, 2008

Lynne: I got your Private Message. Make those galleries unlisted, by going to gallery tools, customize gallery and choosing that setting. You can also tell google, 'stay out' via SmugIsland Settings

http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island

urbanaries · August 13, 2008

Andy wrote:

Lynne: I got your Private Message. Make those galleries unlisted, by going to gallery tools, customize gallery and choosing that setting. You can also tell google, 'stay out' via SmugIsland Settings

http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island

Ok, I see now that some of my galleries had Hello World as yes. Is there a way to globally set all galleries to No?

Secondly, if I make those galleries unlisted, the people I want to be able to browse that 'island' can't. They'll need to know URLs for each gallery, yes?

jfriend · August 13, 2008

urbanaries wrote:

Ok, I see now that some of my galleries had Hello World as yes. Is there a way to globally set all galleries to No?

Secondly, if I make those galleries unlisted, the people I want to be able to browse that 'island' can't. They'll need to know URLs for each gallery, yes?

You can put them all in a sharegroup and then give them the one link to the sharegroup. The sharegrounp would work like your category container.

Or, if you want to continue working the way you were where your family has the link to the category, but it's not generally visible in the UI, you could just put a password on all the galleries. The family would just enter the password once and then they'd have the same viewing experience they do today. The password would keep all search robots out.

timnosenzo · August 13, 2008

urbanaries wrote:

Thank you John for your complete answer. Even though I haven't linked to that category in my CSS, I think I get it now. Thanks so much!!!'

Lynne

Hi Lynne,

John is right, you need to make them unlisted for no one to be able to see them. When you use CSS to hide them (or not list them), all that someone needs to do to see them is disable the CSS on your page, and they show up--which means Google, RSS and the iPhone page an still see them.

hidden galleries showing on various electronic mediums

Comments