Items Showing up on Wrong Sites Through Google Search - follow up

Omeka S
1

Hello,

So this is in way a follow up on the issue raised a number of years ago about items showing on up on the wrong sites when doing a google search. https://forum.omeka.org/t/items-showing-up-on-wrong-sites-through-google-search/12987/1.

We are now running Omeka 4.1.1. and it seems like we might still be encountering the problem where a google search takes the user to the wrong site for a particular item.

For example, we have an item that is in our photography showcase: Father and child on the beach, Cape Town, South Africa. This is the item in the correct site. However if i just google the title " Father and child on the beach, Cape Town, South Africa" I get to the same item, but is now sitting on a different site (even two different sites): Father and child on the beach, Cape Town, South Africa · Percival Kirby Musical Instruments · Ibali and Father and child on the beach, Cape Town, South Africa · rePhotoSA · Ibali
Neither of these two sites have this item as a resource within their site, nor are they a linked resource to that site at all (I also have the exclude resource not in site checked). For all of our sites I have also used the sitemap module to generate a sitemap and submitted to the google search console.

So my thinking was that this should not be happening. If I do the search for this specific title on the cross-site search on our main Omeka S instance landing page I see that it only has the right site associated with that item.

When we had this issue back with an earlier version of Omeka S, i used the solution presented by @giocomai and added the no index tag to my show pages in all of my themes. However, as @jflatnes indicated that from Omeka 3.2 this is included so our current themes do not have this code.

Am i missing the place where I should enable the noindex tag? Or should i go back to include @giocomai code in my current themes to stop this from happening?

Thank you,

Sanjin

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2

So, the code to do “noindex” is definitely there in these versions of Omeka, and there isn’t a setting to turn it on or off.

But you don’t have the tag on your site that I can see.

To double-check: this item, number 113371, doesn’t have any of those sites listed on its sidebar under “Sites” when you view it on the admin side? In general, the Sites listing there and the “noindex” feature run off the same data.

If they’re not listed there (indicating the system sees that those sites don’t contain this item) then it’s possible the issue lies in a module or maybe in your custom theme code.

3

Hi @jflatnes,

Thank for your response and for giving the information. Suspected that the issue was on our side.

I did a double check the item 113371 and it is just assigned to this site:

image
image1920Ă—1530 141 KB

I would like to trouble shoot this and ask you what do you think my approach should be.

The theme I am using is a bit of a customization from the standard omeka themes - but it is only adding an institutional header and footer on the layout.phtml. I could try to assign a very default theme and see if the no index tag shows up (grateful if you could share with me what I should look for to see if it showing up on the page).

I guess otherwise, if it is not that, I would have to start disabling modules one by one to see which one might be writing over the noindex tag.

Advanced Search (3.4.47), Analytics Snippet (3.4.5), Blocks Disposition (3.4.4), Bulk Edit (3.4.34), CSSEditor (1.3.1), CSV Import (2.6.2), Collecting (1.12.1), Common (3.4.68), Contact us or author and report (3.4.22), Custom Ontology (3.4.6), Custom Vocab (2.0.2), Data Visualization (1.4.0), EU Cookie Bar (3.4.5), Easy Admin (3.4.31), Extract Metadata (1.2.0), Extract Text (2.1.0), Faceted Browse (1.7.0), File Sideload (1.7.1), Google Analytics (1.3.2), Group (3.4.7), Guest (3.4.35), Hide Properties (1.3.1), Hierarchy (1.1.2), Item Carousel Block (1.4.0), Item Sets Tree (0.7.3), Log (3.4.29), Mapping (2.1.0), Menu (3.4.10), Meta Tags (3.4.6), Metadata Browse (1.6.0), Next (3.4.49), Numeric Data Types (1.12.0), PDF Embed (1.3.0), Reference (3.4.53), Resource Meta (1.1.0), RestrictedSites (2.3), Rights Statements (1.2.1), Sitemaps (1.1), Timeline (3.4.25), Universal Viewer (3.6.10-4.1.0), Value Suggest (1.17.2), Value Suggest: Any (3.4.5)

Thanks for your time,

Sanjin

4

When it’s working, the “not in this site” items should have this HTML tag near the top in their source, which you could look at with the browser’s View Source tool or the inspector:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
5

Thanks @jflatnes for your guidance.

So I went ahead and checked to see if the tag shows up when I manually change the url to different sites, which have different themes. And the tag did not show up on any of the themes, including the default Omeka ones (Cozy, default, foundation). There was just no tag at all,

Then I started disabling modules, and it seems as that disabling the Block Disposition theme worked. Now if you go on the same link for a site that shouldn’t have that item, the tag for noindex is there.

I will have to see what the effect of disabling Block Disposition does to the sites, especially the ones with older themes. I am not sure if this is just our own problem or something more general with the Block Disposition theme itself.

thanks again,
Sanjin

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