Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Google Indexing Request - Typical Time to Complete?
In Google Search Console, when you request the (re) indexing of a fetched page, what's the average amount of time it takes to re-index and does it vary that much from site to site or are manual re-index request put in a queue and served on a first come - first serve basis despite the site characteristics like domain/page authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO18050 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Google News Sitemap in Different Languages
Thought I'd ask this question to confirm what I already think. I'm curious that if we're publishing something in two language and both are verified by the publishing center if the group would recommend publishing two separate Google News Sitemaps (one in each language) or publishing one in each language.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Should I redirect my xml sitemap?
Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0