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
-
How to index Backlink Fast
hi, From the past some month i am facing the problem in indexing backlinks, please share the method to index backlink in google fast
Technical SEO | | vijay231 -
Homepage not indexed - seems to defy explanation
Hey folks Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site. Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present: Canonical URL is in place Site is shown as indexed in search console No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console No robots meta tags or directives Fetch as Google works Fetch & render works site command returns all other pages info command does not return the homepage homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc) The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve. The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out. But... it's still not indexing the homepage. The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page. It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Mobile website indexing
Hi we have a mobile version of our website at mobile.gardening-services-edinburgh.com its been live for 5, maybe 6 months, it has its own mobile-sitemap.xml have tried submitting this sitemap to google and for some reason it does not index these pages any ideas, most welcome
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
Why are my webpages not getting indexed?
I want to figure out why a lot of my pages for my website are not getting indexed by google. I have installed the SEO plugin by Yoast to my wordpress website. Under the titles and meta section of the plugin options I have set categories and tags to noindex. In WMT, google is saying that all my category pages and most of my tag pages are not being indexed. I want to make sure that the reason these pages are not being indexed are because of the SEO plugin. I want to prevent duplicate content so that is the reason I have set my categories and tags to noindex. Please respond if you know the absolute answer, its very important that I have my website indexed the proper way I want it to.
Technical SEO | | Dino640 -
Google Indexing - what did I missed??
Hello, all SEOers~ I just renewed my web site about 3 weeks ago, and in order to preserve SEO values as much as possible, I did 301 redirect, XML Sitemap and so on for minimize the possible data losses. But the problem is that about week later from site renewal, my team some how made mistake and removed all 301 redirects. So now my old site URLs are all gone from Google Indexing and my new site is not getting any index from Google. My traffic and rankings are also gone....OMG I checked Google Webmaster Tool, but it didn't say any special message other than Google bot founds increase of 404 error which is obvious. Also I used "fetch as google bot" from webmaster tool to increase chance to index but it seems like not working much. I am re-doing 301 redirect within today, but I am not sure it means anything anymore. Any advise or opinion?? Thanks in advance~!
Technical SEO | | Yunhee.Choi0 -
Having www. and non www. links indexed
Hey guys, As the title states, the two versions of the website are indexed in Google. How should I proceed? Please also note that the links on the website are without the www. How should I proceed knowing that the client prefers to have the www. version indexed. Here are the steps that I have in mind right now: I set the preferred domain on GWMT as the one with www. I 301 redirect any non www. URL to the www. version. What are your thoughts? Should I 301 redirect the URL's? or is setting the preference on GWMT enough? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BruLee0 -
Replacing H1's with images
We host a few Japanese sites and Japanese fonts tend to look a bit scruffy the larger they are. I was wondering if image replacement for H1 is risky or not? eg in short... spiders see: Some header text optimized for seo then in the css h1 {
Technical SEO | | -Al-
text-indent: -9999px;
} h1.header_1{ background:url(/images/bg_h1.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; } We are considering this technique, I thought I should get some advise before potentially jeopardising anything, especially as we are dealing with one of the most important on page elements. In my opinion any attempt to hide text could be seen as keyword stuffing, is it a case that in moderation it is acceptable? Cheers0 -
Yahoo and Bing do not index all pages
Only 20% of our pages are indexed by Bing and Yahoo although we have correctly submitted the sitemap to bing webmaster tools and other search engines index all our content. Do you have any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | AEM130