Why are my images not being indexed?
-
I have submitted an image sitemap with over 2,000 images yet only about 35 have been indexed.
Could you please help me understand why Google is not indexing my images?
-
Every image I saw on the site was indexed in the large versions. I imagine you got this solved already, but let me know if there are any questions.
-
Thanks for checking this out.
Doug:
This is the sitemap: http://www.creative-calendars.com/sitemap-image.xml
The CDN is very new in an effort to try and solve this problem. I thought maybe the speed was the issue.
There are no errors.
George:
I have about 750 links from Pinterest to the various images.
-
My first suspicion was that it might be something to do with the content delivery network. I notice that the URL of the images is: "creativecalendars.nocompany1412096296.netdna-cdn.com/"
Looking at the http header on the cdn hosted images I can see that this is being correctly canonicalised to the local image.
What's the URL of the image sitemap? Can you share it so we can take a look?
I take it there are no errors being reported in Webmaster Tools for this image sitemap (Crawl -> Sitemaps).?
The ALT tags on your images appear to be very short/generic or missing. The image file names aren't too descriptive either. You might want to take a look at how you can improve these.
-
Hi Nicole,
Personally I've had lots of issues getting images indexed on large websites - and I've come across other webmasters with the same problems. If you really want to get diagnostic then you need to start splitting out content into different sitemaps as SEO-Buzz suggests so you can see a clearer breakdown in Webmaster Tools.
Another approach you might want to try is doing some image link building - your image content is ripe for being active on Pinterest and other photo sharing platforms. Getting the content placed like this should help with indexing.
Regards,
George
-
Thanks for checking this out.
I tried to analyze the behavior in crawls as you suggested and I noticed that most of the images that have been indexed are from the homepage. What does that mean? I do have a link to other pages from the homepage but that didn't seem to help.
Also, on the few internal pages that were indexed, only the first image was indexed. Could that indicate that it is a speed problem?
-
hmmm...6 months. I don't have any good ideas, but I took a deeper look at your website and although it appears you are using alt text well, the site has very little content and tons of images. I think that is appropriate for your site from a user's perspective, but wondering if Google views the website as "too shallow" to deem it crawl-worthy. If it were my situation, I think I would try a few tests like creating a standalone sitemap with one of your calendar's content page and images in it and submitting it. Another test would be to write more content on one of your calendar's pages and create a standalone sitemap for it, also, to submit. See if the behavior in crawls is any different for either of these. If so, it may give you some insight.
Another test you might try is to refer to images using anchor text instead of just a thumbnail in the content with the link to the image. Not that you would want to use this a lot on your site, but the test would tell you if this helps with indexing and if it does, then you can go from there.
I still recommend that you place a link to your sitemap or sitemap index in your footer. And I hope others will chime in!
-
The site map was submitted at least 6 months ago. All of the pages/posts have been indexed but not the images.
-
When did you submit your sitemap? Perhaps enough time has not passed for a complete index? This can take weeks, even months. Also, consider adding your sitemap.xml or sitemap directory to the root directory of your website.
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
-
Indexing product attributes in sitemap
Hey Mozzers! I'm battling a few questions about the sitemap for my ecommerce store. Could you help me out? Is it necessary to include your product attributes in the sitemap? I'm not sure why it would matter to have a sitemap that lists everything in the color cherry. Also, if the attributes were included in the sitemap, would that count as duplicate content for the same products to show up in multiple attributes? Is there any benefit to submitting the sitemaps individually? For example, submitting /product-sitemap.xml, /product_brand-sitemap.xml versus just /sitemap.xml? Any other best practices for managing my ecommerce sitemap, or great resources, would be very helpful. Thank you! a1vUz
Technical SEO | | localwork0 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
No existing pages in Google index
I have a real estate portal. I have a few categories - for example: flats, houses etc. Url of category looks like that: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1 Each category has about 30-40 pages - BUT in Google index I found url like: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1350 Can you explain it? This url contains just headline etc - but no content! (it´s just generated page by PHP) How is it possible, that Google can find and index these pages? (on the web, there are no backlinks on these pages) thanks
Technical SEO | | visibilitysk0 -
Google Not Indexed WWW name
Here is my domain - http://www.plugnbuy.com . When i see through "site" google not showing with WWW index but the same when i do without WWW.. it is showing in search. So yesturday i changed the setting from GWM to preferred domain as a WWW appear but today still not showing anything... Please help..
Technical SEO | | mamuti0 -
A site is not being indexed by Google Yahoo or Bing
This site - http://adoptionconnection.org/ is not being indexed by any of the search engines. I checked the easy stuff - robots text is: <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">all, index, follow</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noodp</a>" /> <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">robots</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">noydir</a>" /> I have checked what I can determine would cause the issue but have found nothing to prevent it from being indexed. I'm thinking it may be re-directs etc. Any answer would be great. Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Intergen0 -
Any idea why our sitemap images aren't indexed?
Here's our sitemap: http://www.driftworks.com/shop/sitemap/dw_sitemap.xml In google webmaster tools, I can see the sitemap report and it says: Items:Web Submitted:2,798 Indexed:2,910 Items:Images Submitted:3,178 Indexed:0 Do you have any idea why our images are not being indexed according to webmaster tools? I checked a few of the image URLs and they worked nicely. Thanks in advance, J
Technical SEO | | DWJames0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
What is the best image format to put on your site
Hi at the moment i am working with images to try and speed up my site and i am wondering what is the best format to save images and then put on my site. I have been playing around with photoshop where they have the following formats png-24 gif (but not sure which one i should choose or jpeg I would be grateful for your advice and also to know what size i should try and keep the image down to many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860