Table of Contents
Enabling Google and other search engines to find your archives
How to enable Google and other web search engines to find and index the contents of your archives.
22. March 2025
Table of Contents
Letting search engines find an archive
Open the Archive properties (Tools > Manage site > Archives), open the properties sheet of an archive,and go to the General page.
In the Other section, turn on the Allow crawlers to index archive toggle. This feature is enabled by default for all new archives.
How this feature works
When web crawling is enabled, FotoWeb allows crawlers, or robots, to index the entire contents of your archives so that users who search using Google, for example, can find pictures and other material on the site.
Note that this only applies to archives that are open to the public; archives that require user authentication cannot be accessed by an indexing robot. Therefore, any assets that are stored in archives that control access with an access list will be off-limits for external search engines.
Note: When an archive has been indexed by Google or another Internet search engine, removing the above checkmark on the archive does not immediately remove your archive from the search engines' listings. This could take several days, maybe even weeks. However, you may be able to use Google webmaster tools or other utilities to notify a search engine to remove your listing sooner.
HTML tags that are used for crawler instruction
When Allow crawlers to index archive is enabled:
- All subfolders and assets in an archive are indexed, and follow is enabled: INDEX, FOLLOW
- The archive root is not indexed, but follow is enabled to enable all the individual assets and subfolders in the archive to be fully indexed: NOINDEX, FOLLOW
When Allow crawlers to index archive is disabled:
- The archive, the root folder, subfolders, and assets are not indexed: NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
Irrespective of the above settings
- If an album is showcased on the home page, that album is always indexed: INDEX, FOLLOW
- An album that is NOT showcased on the homepage is not publicly available per se, and the album and assets are therefore not indexed: NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW.
A user who does not want an album crawled by a bot should not showcase the album but instead share it with individual users.
Note: The crawler flags set by FotoWeb and in any robots.txt file on the site are accepted by all well-behaved crawlers. Ill-behaved crawlers, however, may ignore these flags and still insist on indexing everything they can get to. Such crawlers can be banned from accessing the site, but the procedure for doing so goes beyond the scope of the FotoWeb documentation.