Well I use magazine theme by studio-press on my wordpress blog: www.mp3z.pk I had dominating images at Google images. My images ranked on top and I got a lot of traffic through it. But soon in 2-5 days, the traffic was gone. On searching those images again, I could see that Google has de-indexed them and now the title of the image is replaced by something called "timthumb.php" . I can also see this file in my theme files. I'm not a coder so I don't know how to fix this or what it actually does. Can anyone help me in fixing all these images back to Google and also not let it happen in the future ? I would be grateful to you.
Timthumb automatically creates thumbnails from images. It's not part of Wordpress but many themes have it. Not sure how to fix that problem, but it's a very popular script so I'm sure there is an answer somewhere.
Ditto. I would also add that this script is no longer needed for current versions of WordPress which has this functionality built into it. Any theme using the timthumb script is sorely out of date. I would look to where you purchased the theme and see if the author has updated it, if you have not done too many changes to the original. It is possible that you can revise the coding yourself and use WP's get_the_thumbnail() function in lieu of the timthumb function. I am not sure what you mean by the "title" being replaced. Your thumbnails are not showing a title attribute and the alt attribute is fine. The source of the image thumbnail shows timthumb.php for the Url, but that has nothing to do with your images getting "de-indexed". Whatever the problem with Image search, I assure you it has nothing to do with this script.
By the title I mean if you search mp3z.pk in Google, all images have a filename timthumb.php if you just move mouse over it
I am not seeing that when I hover over the images. I see the filename of the image w/link, dimensions, alt attribute, and the domain. Here is the link to the image search using site:mp3z.pk as the query.
Not the latest images bro. They get replaced by timthumb.php title'd image with it's own dimensions after some time or when I add new posts, previous ones are replaced. You should search just "mp3z.pk" instead of "site:mp3z.pk" to see the ones I'm talking about.
I do that search and do not see anything there either. Still not sure what you are referring to. All I know is your images are getting indexed correctly and you should not worry about it.
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=922&bih=517&q=mp3z.pk&gbv=2&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq= Hover the first 3 images here. You can see timthumb.php
Okie dokie. Everything following ? after the filename is not part of the filename. Google is displaying what it thinks the filename of the image is without the parameters. This is normal behavior for image search. Since your thumbnails are just that, thumbnails of originals, you can direct the robots not to index anything in your /wp-content/themes/magazine_10/tools/ folder which includes timthumb.php After all, this is just basically duplicate content. The posts which have your gallery thumbnails on it, in fact, are duplicate images with the correct filenames. The gallery page thumbnails are the actual images you want indexed to begin with. Another option, if you want your thumbnails to be indexed with the proper filename, then recode the theme to use WordPress function get the post thumbnail() which will use the correct filename of the thumbnail.
Yes you are right. Google is actually confusing the thumbnails with the actual image. Some days back, I had the direct URL of the image indexed properly but after it, that got replaced by this timthumb thing which is not the actual picture but just a 250x250 size of it, just a thumbnail. Your 2nd option looks difficult as it requires re-coding. But I didn't understand the 1st option properly. Can you explain it a bit please ? Thanks.
Option 1 is a robots.txt exclusion for the directory /wp-content/themes/magazine_10/tools/ which has the the timthumb.php script. Since that script only appears on archive pages (blog, category, tag, etc.) it would prevent all of the scripted thumbnails from being indexed. You have to exclude this for Google's image crawling spider, and any other media spiders as well. Probably best to blanket all spiders in one go. In robots.txt, amend the your global User-agent directive with your exclusion: User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-content/themes/magazine_10/tools/ Code (markup): You may have other exclusions under the * user-agent entry, in which case you can tack this on to the list. If you do not have the * entry, then add the two lines as written above. The * will restrict all spiders from indexing the timthumb.php script. This will go a long way to clean up your image search and provide more relevant results. Look at the tale-end of a site:mp3z.pk "megan fox" - Google Search and you will notice quite a few timthumb images that appear near a link entry on an archive page for Megan.
Ok I have set up a Robots.txt now, Can you see if it's fine ? http://www.mp3z.pk/robots.txt I hope this will allow my images to be properly indexed by Google now since this really is a drawback for results.
All you need it the disallow. It is assumed Allow: / for all agents. User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-content/themes/magazine_10/tools/ Code (markup):