Is there a way to open my Omeka database to Google so that someone searching for, say, “Jane Jones Wichita Kansas” on Google would get a link to the item page for “Studio portrait of Jane and John Jones, taken in Wichita, Kansas”?
As long as your items are public, all of the text in your metadata and exhibits can be indexed by Google.
Your site will appear alongside other websites that mention that name or place, but it may not be first in the rankings.
When I search “boklage trim wichita” Google presents three hits from my Omeka site – an xml file that downloads, a page of xml code, and the browse all items page of my site. None of these is useful. Do I have a setting wrong somewhere?
Is that item public? (It’s a checkbox under the Save Changes button)
It may take a little time for Google’s index to register a newly published page.
Yes, it’s public.
I’m using the Boklage search as my test because it’s one of my earliest added items. The hits in Google would seem to suggest that the site has been indexed, but the results are wonky.
This isn’t an Omeka problem, it is most likely something that was on your server shielding search engines from finding and indexing all of the content.
It difficult to determine exactly what happened here, as the indexing is very uneven. If your site was protected from web crawling while you were building it, (with a file on your server, robots.txt), and that was recently updated to allow for crawling, the process of indexing may be happening in a more haphazard way.
Try this process again in a couple of weeks and see if it improves.