Minor Edits Killing Links...

Bummer but thanks for the heads up Gary, I will stay away from editing today.

I can see changing the title of an image could break a back link, but keywords?

Thomas as you can see from the titles on both nothing changed in that regard. I have had this happen before, but months ago.

Oh, Gary I meant that I could see a link being broken if you changed (edited) the "title" of an artwork, but I did not believe that doing edits, minor or major additions to your keywords would break a link.

Certainly, I could see it happen if you deleted all or some critical keywords. Are you saying it effects "in house" using the FAA search engine SEO, or search engines such as Yahoo or Google?

Since it changes the link address it would be external SEO affected.

i break links all the time. i'm still fixing the -- double dash in links from when it did that. doesn't seem to hurt too many things. odd its adding that 1 and 2 though - unless its the same name and you have 2 of the same with that name.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Changing the title will break a link. The first one has a 1 in the title, the second has a 2. But the actual image title has no numbers. Strange.

Its a bug, I explained it some time ago in a post, cant find it now..

But, if you have 2 images with the same title (as you do), then the 2nd image will automatically get a '1-' added to the left side of the URL (to make the URL unique).

Now the problem/bug happens when you make any kind of edit to the 2nd image (the one with the '1-' in it).

It will alternate between '1-' and '2-' every time you save it.

So, to return it back to '1-' just save it again, and it should fix the link back to '1-' and your SEO will then be fine.

Personally, I would try to make sure all images have different/unique titles, so this doesn't happen, but really the bug should be fixed.

Rob.

I change all the time...keywords, descriptions etc... anything that I think may improve the search in a better way....I tend to agree with Mike that I have never noticed a problem because of it. As a matter of fact, I think it may help at times as I think it reboots to the bot crawlers all over again and "refreshes" the search so to speak...

Karen Wiles
http://karen-wiles.artistwebsites.com

Changing the title, which it turn changes the URL means that any links you have on any other web pages to your image will no longer work, they will be broken links.

So, people may find a page that you have put your link on, but when they click it, they will just be given a 404 page not found.

Same with if you have linked your image on any post on Social networks, like FB, Twitter, Pinterest etc.

Also, Google web and also image results will be invalid, as the URL doesnt exist any more, and you will have to wait until Google re-indexes your page. (Or if you submit it yourself)

So, IMO, generally it a bad thing to do for SEO and links.

I was just wondering if we still had to double save when editing links. I've had it do the 1/2 thing happen even if just changing keywords or descriptions. I had hoped this would have been covered in the new release. I feel for you guys with 100 of images, keeping them live.

My understanding though is that we can now really see how keywords are handled, and think that will be a great help. Has anyone checked to see if the the google analysis on the AW sites is still working with the new version? Just think we might be able to actually start getting traffic data.

-- mary ellen anderson

GA wasnt working to start with, but Sean fixed it once I mentioned it in the AW thread... so it should be fine now.

Dont think you are going to get anything more through from GA, as it still is only the AW site as it was before, and they still dont allow it on our FAA pages :(

That is where I at least would really want it to help my marketing.

Rob.

Fireflux,

I have never seen it go back and forth between 1- and 2-. It makes sense that the URL would increment, since two images with the same title can't share the same URL. I am not concerned with that, what I am concerned about is changes that should have no impact on on the URL, inadvertently do.

My links on my personal website, which links to my Artistswebsites galleries got broken when I switched to the new version. Not sure why...but I had to redo all the links on my website. Y'all may want to check your's if you have them linking to your AW

@Gary, so if you go back into that image, the one with the '2-' at the beginning, and edit it, and then just pressing 'submit' without changing anything, its not changing the URL back to the '1-' one?

Strange, Just tried it on a test image of mine, and the bug still seems to be there for me.

Maybe there is something else that causes it...

Rob.