[Forum] Photography Site User Images

[Dennis Kaczor]

Hi all,

I run a photography based forum and users can link their images in the forums from there site like Flickr etc...
I'm running Vbulletin 4.1.5 and have been searching for weeks trying to find the information but always end down the blank road for some reason or other and I don't know why that this is so hard to find. Anyways I will give this another try here.

I have members link their images into the message thread such as from Flickr etc. and that is fine, the problem is that Google and the others cannot find those message threads because of the lack of the ALT=tag and that is why when I do a search for my site that I don't see them being indexed. So my question is how does one go about getting the ALT=Tags in place and used to get indexed?

I know that they use the IMG icon for the URL to be placed into the thread.

So what or how do I go about getting these images from being indexed? I really need someone to walk me through this as I have not found any searches that I have done to find how to achieve this, all I got to this point is that that adding the alt tag is going to to get more SEO to find the images.

If I have this wrong please let me know, but so far this is all I have got to gone on. I really don't understand why the infomation is so hard to find on how to go about this for vb4, the older versions there seems to be more infomation out there that I have seen, but nothing for the current version.

Thanks in advance.

[BirdOPrey5]

You could make a new BBCode, also called IMG, but for this one you choose the "Use Option" set to YES.

When people enter an IMAGE instead of


[img]http://www.qapla.com/ju/jump.gif[/img]

they use:

[img="Jump Smiley"]http://www.qapla.com/ju/jump.gif[/img]


That will put the alt tags in the image link.

For the BBCode replacement you'd use the code:

<img src="{param}" alt="{option}" border="0" />

But it won't do anything to help old images already posted and it won't do anything if someone isn't willing to enter alt text.

[Dennis Kaczor]

You could make a new BBCode, also called IMG, but for this one you choose the "Use Option" set to YES.

When people enter an IMAGE instead of


[img]http://www.qapla.com/ju/jump.gif[/img]

they use:

[img="Jump Smiley"]http://www.qapla.com/ju/jump.gif[/img]


That will put the alt tags in the image link.

For the BBCode replacement you'd use the code:

<img src="{param}" alt="{option}" border="0" />

But it won't do anything to help old images already posted and it won't do anything if someone isn't willing to enter alt text.

Thanks very much for the information on this and I will give it a try and see what happens. Too bad that I cannot find a way that would do this witout using BBCode, but will keep looking in the mean time this will have to do.

Again thanks very much.

[BirdOPrey5]

You could edit a php file and make the alt code the filename or such, but that isn't very useful from an SEO standpoint. There's no way to force people to enter a proper alt description. Modifications however are discussed on vbulletin.org, not here.

[Dennis Kaczor]

You could edit a php file and make the alt code the filename or such, but that isn't very useful from an SEO standpoint. There's no way to force people to enter a proper alt description. Modifications however are discussed on vbulletin.org, not here.

Thanks for the information and I will check into this more later on and see if there is a better way but for now this BBCode will have to do for now and thanks for the help.