Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
-
Hi Mozzers,
We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed.
The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are.
The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt.
There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml.
Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load.
To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1.
Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed?
The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue.
Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough.
Thank you for taking the time to read and help.
Regards,
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
I'm just following the thread as I have a similar problem. Would you mind sharing your results from the tests?
Thanks,
Bogdan -
Thanks Everett - that's exactly what I intend to do.
We will be testing two new sitemaps with 100 x URLs each. 1. With just the file extension removed and 2. With the entire cropping part of the URL removed, as suggested by Matt.
Will be interested to see whether just one or both of the sitemaps are successful. Will of course post the outcome here, for anyone who might have this problem in future.
-
It isn't always that simple. Maybe commas don't present a problem on their own. Maybe double file extensions don't present a problem on their own. Maybe a CDN doesn't present a problem on its own. Maybe very long, complicated URLs don't present a problem on their own.
You have all of these. Together, in any combination, they could make indexation of your images a problem for Google.
Just test it out on a few. Get rid of the file extension. If that doesn't work, get rid of the comma. That is all you can do. Start with whatever is easiest for the developer to implement, and test it out on a few before rolling it out across all of your images.
-
Cheers for that mate - especially the useful Excel formula.
I am going to try a few things in isolation so that we can accurately say which element/s caused the issue.
Thanks again, mate.
-
Ignore the developer - what worked for one doesn't mean it'll work for you
The easiest way to test this is to manually create a sitemap with 100 or so 'clean' image URLs. Just pull the messy ones into excel and use the formula below to create a clean version (Use A1 for messy, B1 for formula).
Good luck mate.
=CONCATENATE("image:imageimage:lochttp://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/",RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-(FIND("",(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/","",(IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/",""))))))))),"</image:loc></image:image>")
-
Thanks for the responses guys, much appreciated.
In terms of the commas, that was something that I put to the developer, however he was able to come back with examples where this has clearly not been an issue - e.g. apartable.com have commas in their URLs and use the same CDN (Coudinary).
However, I agree with you that double file extension could be the issue. I may have to wait until next week to find out as the developer is working on another project, but will post the outcome here once I know.
Thank you again for the help!
-
Hello Edlondon,
I think you're probably answering your own question here. Google typically doesn't have any problem indexing images served from a CDN. However, I've seen Google have problems with commas in the URL at times. Typically it happens when other elements in the URL are also troublesome, such as your double file extension.
Are you able to rename the files to get rid of the superfluous .jpg extension? If so, I'd recommend trying it out on a few dozen images. We could come up with a lot of hypothesis, but that would be the one I'd test first.
-
Hmmm I step off here, never used cloudinary.com or even heard of them. I personally use NetDNA, with pull zones (which means that they load the image/css/js from your origin and store a version on their servers) while handling cropping/resizing from my own end (via PHP and then loading that image, example: http://cdn.fulltraffic.net/blog/thumb/58x58/youtube-video-xQmQeKU25zg.jpg try changing the 58x58 to another size and my server will handle the crop/resize while NetDNA will serve it and store for future loads).
-
Found one of the sites with the same Cloudinary URLs with commas - apartable.com
See Google image results: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:apartable.com&tbm=isch
Their images appear to be well indexed. One thing I have noticed, however, is that we often have .jpg twice in the image URL. E.g.:
- http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/c_crop,g_north,h_0.9,w_1.0/c_fill,d_no_image_icon-720x720**.jpg**,g_center,h_900,q_80,w_900/v1352574983/oyfos82vwvmxdx91hxaw**.jpg**
- http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/c_crop,g_north,h_0.9,w_1.0/c_fill,d_no_image_icon-720x720**.jpg**,g_center,h_900,q_80,w_900/v1352574989/s09cv3krfn7gbyvw3r2y**.jpg**
- http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/c_crop,g_north,h_0.9,w_1.0/c_fill,d_no_image_icon-720x720**.jpg**,g_center,h_407,q_80,w_407/v1352575010/rl7cl4xi0timza1sgzxj**.jpg**
Wonder if that is confusing Google? If so, none of this is consistent, as they do have a few images indexed with exactly the same kind of URL as those listed above.
-
Thought I had them on email but must be within our fairly cumbersome Skype thread... let me have a dig through when I get chance and I'll post them up here.
-
Hmmmm, okay... Could you post the examples they gave, and an example page where the images are located on the site?
-
Hi Matt,
Thought I should let you know that (i) the X-Robots-Tag was not set, so that's not the issue and (ii) the URLs, although ugly, are not the issue either. We had a couple of examples of websites with the same thing (I'm told the commas facilitate on-the-fly sizing and cropping) and their images were indexed fine.
So, back to the drawing board for me! Thank you very much for the suggestions, really do appreciate it.
Mark
-
Hmm interesting - we hadn't thought of the X-Robots-Tag http header. I'm going to fire that over to the developer now.
As for the URLs, they are awful! But I am told that this is not a problem - but perhaps this is worth re-chasing up as other solutions have, so far, been unfruitful.
Thanks for taking the time to help, Matt - I'll let you know if that fixes it! Unfortunately it could be another week before I know, as the developer is currently working on another project so any changes may be early-mid next week.
Thanks again...
-
This is a bit of a long shot but if the files have been uploaded using their API it may have been that the 'X-Robots-Tag' http header is set to no-index...
Also, those URLs don't look great with the commas in them. Have you tried doing a small subset that just has the image id (e.g. http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/nprvu0z6ri227cgnpmqc.jpg)?
Matt
-
Hi Federico,
Thanks very much for taking the time to respond.
To answer your question, we are using http://cloudinary.com/. So, taking one of the examples from the XML sitemap I posted above, an example of an image URL is http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/c_crop,g_north,h_0.9,w_1.0/c_fill,d_no_image_icon-720x720.jpg,g_center,h_900,q_80,w_900/v1352575097/nprvu0z6ri227cgnpmqc.jpg (what a lovely URL!).
I had a look at http://res.cloudinary.com/robots.txt and it seems that they are not blocking anything - the disallow instruction is commented out. I assume that is indeed the robots.txt I should be looking at?
Assuming it is, this does not appear to get to the bottom of why the images are not being indexed.
Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated - we have 17k unique images that could be driving traffic and this is a key way that people find our kind of website.
Thanks,
Mark
-
Within that robot.txt file on the CDN (which one are you using?) have you set to allow Google to index them?
Most CDNs I know allows you to block engines via the robots.txt to avoid bandwidth consumption.
In the case you are using NetDNA (MaxCDN) or the like, make sure your robots file isn't disallowing robots to crawl.
We are using a CDN too to deliver images and static files and all of them are being indexed, we tested disallowing crawlers but it caused a lot of warnings, so instead we no allow all of them to read and index content (is a small price to pay to have your content indexed).
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Index Problem
Hi guys I have a critical problem with google crawler. Its my website : https://1stquest.com I can't create sitemap with online site map creator tools such as XML-simemap.org Fetch as google tools usually mark as partial MOZ crawler test found both HTTP and HTTPS version on site! and google cant index several pages on site. Is problem regards to "unsafe URL"? or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Okesta0 -
Google Frequently Indexing - Good or Bad?
Hi, My website is only 4 months old and receives about 40 to 50 organic visits every day. It currently has about 100 pages out of which only 3-4 rank in the top 10 for the target KWs. I usually try to publish, at least 1 article a day but sometimes certain articles are more than 2000 words long with a few of infographics and hence takes way more time (maybe even 3 days to publish one) Only over the last week, I am observing that every time i am publishing a page (usually daily) google is indexing them the same day. This I have heard happens for moderately big sites but my site is really small at this stage. Note: For the first 80 pages, I used to "fetch as googlebot" in webmasters as otherwise my site would be crawled once in 2 weeks but over the last 3-4 weeks, i rely on googles scheduled visits. Is this a good or bad sign? I would like to assume its good because of my engagement. Though for only organic visits, my Gogle Analytics bounce rate is 65% in analytics out of the remaining 35%, the avg time on site >7 mins. That means if someone sticks to my site, they consume a lot of my content. Also, since analytics' bounce rate is not same as the search bounce (back button) I would like to consider that the bounce is actually lesser than that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dwautism0 -
Google indexing "noindex" pages
1 weeks ago my website expanded with a lot more pages. I included "noindex, follow" on a lot of these new pages, but then 4 days ago I saw the nr of pages Google indexed increased. Should I expect in 2-3 weeks these pages will be properly noindexed and it may just be a delay? It is odd to me that a few days after including "noindex" on pages, that webmaster tools shows an increase in indexing - that the pages were indexed in other words. My website is relatively new and these new pages are not pages Google frequently indexes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Google Places Listing Active In Two Seperate Google Places Accounts?
Hi is there any issues with having a google places listing in two seperate google places accounts. For example we have a client who cannot access their old google places account (ex-employee had their login details which they can't get) and want us to take control over the listing. If we click the "is this your listing" manage this page button - and claim the listing, will this transfer the listing to our control? Or will it create a duplicate? Are there any problems having the listing in different separate accounts. Is it a situation in which the last person who manages the listing takes control? And the listing automatically deactivates from the old account? Do all the images remain aswell? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney
Tom0 -
Broken sitemaps vs no sitemaps at all?
The site I am working on is enormous. We have 71 sitemap files, all linked to from a sitemap index file. The sitemaps are not up to par with "best practices" yet, and realistically it may be another month or so until we get them cleaned up. I'm wondering if, for the time being, we should just remove the sitemaps from Webmaster Tools altogether. They are currently "broken", and I know that sitemaps are not mandatory. Perhaps they're doing more harm than good at this point? According to Webmaster Tools, there are 8,398,082 "warnings" associated with the sitemap, many of which seem to be related to URLs being linked to that are blocked by robots.txt. I was thinking that I could remove them and then keep a close eye on the crawl errors/index status to see if anything changes. Is there any reason why I shouldn't remove these from Webmaster Tools until we get the sitemaps up to par with best practices?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
Why is my XML sitemap ranking on the first page of google for 100s of key words versus the actual relevant page?
I still need this question answerd and I know it's something I must have changed. But google is ranking my sitemap for 100s of key terms versus the actual page. It's great to be on the first page but not my site map...... Geeeez.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ursalesguru0 -
Google places
Is there away to get to the top of google places? Can it be manipulated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dynamic080 -
Is Google just taking long time to re-index or did I make a boo boo?...
Couple weeks ago I changed a url on my site from using underscores to using hyphens I setup a 301 redirect and added appropriate canonical to the new page. My site is crawled daily and I've done this on several other pages with good results but this page is just not being indexed right… I see my page #8 with some random title Is there some "interim index" that Google has? It's just bazaar to me, any thoughts? Thanks! - Cliff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CliffAuerswald0