XF 2.2 No pictures in Google

darkeye · Apr 22, 2022

Hi. There are a lot of pictures posted on my forum. Previously, guests could always click on all images.

About three months ago I made the setting that guests don't have permission to click on pictures.

Now I noticed that a lot of pictures from my forum are not listed on Google. Does that have something to do with the new setting?

What can I do about it? Is it possible to configure that robots can click on the pictures but guests cannot?

Paul B · Apr 22, 2022

Google has the same access as guests.

darkeye said:
Is it possible to configure that robots can click on the pictures but guests cannot?

No, that's cloaking.

You can't show content to robots and crawlers which guests cannot see.

digitalpoint · Apr 22, 2022

Brogan said:
Google has the same access as guests.

No, that's cloaking.

You can't show content to robots and crawlers which guests cannot see.

Not exactly. It would more fall under Google's Flexible Sampling system designed for paywalls (which is a replacement for their earlier First Click Free program). Where the content is the same, but permission to view it can vary on a per user (or guest basis).

The problem in @darkeye's situation is you are trying to do it with images and Google relies on HTML structured data to be told when you are showing something to it that a normal guest might not be able to see. If you were doing it for certain threads or maybe all the threads in a forum that you had to be registered to view them normally, it would work. XenForo doesn't support it out of the box though, so you would need to do some custom stuff (for example give Googlebot unique permissions without them logging in).