carlocapocasa

Okay so I have done a little research and have found some evidence that iframes are fine with Google, but perhaps not with Bing.

To get to the bottom of this, there are currently three identical test sites: sda s3b and s3c. These are blank wordpress sites with a random themes and some sample content. They are absolutely identical, except: s3a has no audiobar, s3b has ordinary audiobar as it is now, and s3c disables audiobar if the user agent string says it is a Robot. This experiment started on April 7 2013 and the winner will go into the next release. More information on https://carlocapocasa.com/tech/audiobar/

@bsavi: While I do appreciate your support, I would like to politely ask you to be courteous, that would help out very much. I would like pjabtg
to feel very welcome here, and he seems to have had a very good reason to rate me poorly. Even if he didn’t, the audiobar forums are a place where we need to be friendly. I know your intentions are good, so thank you for that.

Hi there! Thanks for using Audiobar.

Killing google ratings sucks, of course. If I really did kill your ranking, I am very sorry!

In general terms, Audiobar is about having the iframe for continuous playback, and then work towards making that iframe have as few side effects as possible.

For SEO, Audiobar puts your entire home page content within the iframe tags, so Google can access it without loading the iframe at all. The assumption being that that backup content would be treated equally.

It seemed to work well enough for me, but I didn’t do a long term A/B test. Assuming what you say is correct, I might have been wrong. Or Google changed the way it works and made me wrong after the fact.

Since this is very important, I will change the SEO approach to simply disabling audiobar if the browser user agent is a known spider.

Until then, you could also try working around the issue by installing a Google Sitemap plugin.

Hi there!

Can you measure that your Audiobar kills your SEO?

Or your you guessing that Audiobar kills your SEO?

My guess is that it has no effect. The IFRAME-page also contains your entire site, including links.

Another thing you can do is use and XML sitemap.

If you have reliable data, please post, I’d love to adapt.

Hm, it’s possible that Audiobar doesn’t support ports that are not 80. I’ll see if I can check that out.

Carlo

Nice site!

One of the problems with not solving the problems yet is that I don’t own anything that has iOS… and Apple isn’t exactly patient with developers who don’t own Apple hardware. (Anyone from Apple reading this? I run linux, be nice to me!)

I suppose Audiobar could be programmed disable and just present the play/download buttons on iOS stuff. In fact, that’s a pretty good idea! I’ll see if this can go into 1.0.5.

Carlo

Might be a while… but I’d be happy to put a copy of Audiobar on github if you can produce a working patch! From what I gather the problem is not so much in the core of Audiobar but just working around a couple of multisite particulars.

Carlo

Hi there!

Good for you in self-investigating!

I had a couple of similar problems creeping up which are leading me to change the way Audiobar looks for MP3 links to something more robust, but it might be a while till I figure out how to make the switch without breaking everyone’s existing pages. So the best you can do right now is find some way to work around the problem.

Please do post if you find a workaround!

Carlo

Hi there!

Oh no problem, we all do what we can…

What you need to do is edit your theme to have the WordPress page loop on your front page, and hide it with HTML comments. Then Audiobar will read your songs.

Carlo

Hi there!

I’m sorry, not right now. I’ll make a note that you asked though… It’s been asked before but there’s also lot’s of similar small improvements that need to be made.

Carlo

Hi there!

Thank you very much for your interest in Audiobar!

Yes, that’s actually a very good idea and it’s something I’m thinking about, but haven’t found a really good way of solving yet. The hard part of adding new features is keeping things simple. Don’t you just hate software that does everything, but you can’t find it?

For the time being here’s how you can hide the links:

1. Open your first post, where your audio links are.
2. click the HTML tab on the top left of your editor. You will see the raw HTML of your post
3. Find your MP3 links
4. put HTML comments around it, like so:

<!--
<a href="something.mp3>something</a>
<a href="something-else.mp3>something else</a>
-->

So you put this <!– before the links, and this –> after.

Please note that people who know how to use the “View Source” browser feature will still be able to download your stuff.

Let me know how it goes!

Carlo

Hi there!

As Chad mentioned, Page cache is probably it.

Audiobar’s “cache headers” (instructions to the browser on how to handle caching) should normally let you uninstall smoothly so I’ll see if I can improve them.

Thanks for helping make audiobar better with your report!

Carlo

Hi there!

Sorry to see you go!

The 404 behavior is fixed in trunk and will work properly in the upcoming 1.0.4 release. Thanks for reporting and helping make Audiobar better!

Audiobar is probably not recognizing the songs on your homepage, probably because it is not compatible with your theme. If you can, please try the default theme and see if it works.

If it does not, please report your web server (Apache, Nginx, IIS…). Also, try upgrading to 1.0.3 and see if it works.

Carlo

It is certainly a problem with incorrectly copying and pasting the Autoplay code. It was broken, but should work now.

I’ll provide a better way to do it shortly.

Carlo

Hi there! Thanks for helping make Audiobar better! All feedback does ??

The short pause means Audiobar is not seeing your tracks on what is considers your front page.

Finding out what is on your front page has proven to be less than trivial because different themes use different mechanisms to retrieve and display content.

Are you using a custom theme?

If not, did you insert the link onto a post or page on the home page, rather than directly in the theme?

Also, is the link displayed as a simple link, or do you see play buttons?

Let’s make it work ??

Carlo