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.
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
-
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping.
My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files.
Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled?
Thanks all!
-
I did this accidentally as well recently and had 100% of my products disallowed from google shopping within 48 hours. Sounds like it's not an option. They need the crawl your images folder to make sure you have valid images in you product listings.
-
if your rankings are improving, then good move!
-
Hey Richard,
We were previously blocking googlebot from crawling our images at all (through disallowing /img/ and /imgp/ in robots.txt file. We removed this block after recieving this email from Google:
Thank you for participating in Google Product Search. It has come to our attention that a robots.txt file is preventing us from crawling some or all of the images on your site. In order for us to access and display the images you provide in your product listings, we'd like you to modify your robots.txt file to allow user-agent 'googlebot' to crawl your site.
_Failure for Google to access your images may affect the visibility of your items on Google Product Search and Product Ad results. _
While I totally agree that image traffic will not convert like standard traffic, it is free and who knows, we may just pick up a few sales from it. Of course if this comes at the cost of eating up a disproportionate amount of our crawl allowance relative to the value (or avoiding any penalties from Google Product Search) we'd be better off leaving the block on.
By way of an update, it looks like our rankings have started to improve in Google product search. We first experienced a drop in rankings and traffic from Product Search on 4/16 and removed the block from robots.txt on 4/22.
-
Why do you need Google to reach inside your img folder? Images display on the page and are indexed then. Sure, if you are selling images, then I can see the need for this, but to just crawl the img folder??
If it is not huge, I do not see it penalizing you. I would make sure all images are named using keywords as crawling pic001.jpg, pic002.jpg, product01.jpg, logo.gif will not do you any good anyway.
Also I find bad linking coming from Google image searches. No one searches to purchase a coffee cup and looks in Google images to do so. Conversely, if someone is searching images of coffee cups to use in whatever, having them click over to your site is a waste of time. They are just going to grab the image and go leaving your metrics a mess.
I hope that helps.
-
It may effect crawl allowance but depends on the size of your site, page rank and trust etc.
One of the best ways to determine crawl depth and whether you have any issues is to create separate sitemaps for your most important content or areas of your site. You could also create an image sitemap.
Then you can monitor these over time and and will give you a good picture of which content is being crawled and indexed well and which content/images are not. This may also help you to find out if the site structure is too deep or whether you need to link more to deeper content in order to improve crawling and indexation.
Hope this helps.
-
Personally, I wouldn't try to figure out the impact by looking at crawl stats. I'd be more focused on end results. Have we had an increase in organic traffic, or conversions from Google shopping since we opened it up, or has either of these gone down?
That's what matters, and is the only real indicator as to whether it was a wise move or not.
-
You could check your server stats on who is accessing your site, this should tell you what bots are going to your pages when. I don't know what control panel you are using for your site, but if you are using Cpanel, I am sure there are tutorials online to help you find this information.
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
-
520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare
I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/
Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Folders in url structure?
Hello, Revamping an out-of-date website and am wondering if I need to include the folders (categories) in the url structure? The proposed structure has 8 main folders. I've been reading that Google is ok if the folder is not included in the url, but is it really? The hesitation I have is that the urls are getting long and the main folder only has only a sub folder beneath it. So, /folder-name/facility-name/treatment-overview. This looks too long, doesn't it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | lfrazer1230 -
Size of image for article Schema
Hi, I implemented schema markup for an article and all tested fine and I can see it being fired in preview mode of Google Tag Manager. But when I run the URL which has it applied through Google Structured Testing tool it is not appearing. I have now read that the image needs to be a certain size. For AMP articles this appears to be 12oo pixels wide http://www.thesempost.com/google-changes-image-size-requirements-amp-articles/ But what about non-AMP articles? Does it need to be that big too?
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Blogger /blog Folder level redirect setup using .htaccess
We have a blog currently powered by the free blogger.com website. We have set it up as blog.example.com we wish to seti it up as example.com/blog how can we do this using .htaccess file? we understand how to update htacess, but we don't know what code we should enter to achieve what we want our website is hosted on Apache servers with plesk control panel
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
How to Delete the slug /category/ from wordpress category pages
Hi all, I would like to ask you what's the better way to eliminate the slug /category/ form the wordpress category pages. I need to delete the slug /category/ to make the url seo frendly. The problem is that my site is an old site with the page indexed by Google for a long time. Thanks for your advice.
Technical SEO | | salvyy0 -
Location Based Content / Googlebot
Our website has local content specialized to specific cities and states. The url structure of this content is as follows: www.root.com/seattle www.root.com/washington When a user comes to a page, we are auto-detecting their IP and sending them directly to the relevant location based page - much the way that Yelp does. Unfortunately, what appears to be occurring is that Google comes in to our site from one of its data centers such as San Jose and is being routed to the San Jose page. When a user does a search for relevant keywords, in the SERPS they are being sent to the location pages that it appears that bots are coming in from. If we turn off the auto geo, we think that Google might crawl our site better, but users would then be show less relevant content on landing. What's the win/win situation here? Also - we also appear to have some odd location/destination pages ranking high in the SERPS. In other words, locations that don't appear to be from one of Google's data center. No idea why this might be happening. Suggestions?
Technical SEO | | Allstar0 -
Googlebot Crawl Rate causing site slowdown
I am hearing from my IT department that Googlebot is causing as massive slowdown/crash our site. We get 3.5 to 4 million pageviews a month and add 70-100 new articles on the website each day. We provide daily stock research and marke analysis, so its all high quality relevant content. Here are the crawl stats from WMT: http://imgur.com/dyIbf I have not worked with a lot of high volume high traffic sites before, but these crawl stats do not seem to be out of line. My team is getting pressure from the sysadmins to slow down the crawl rate, or block some or all of the site from GoogleBot. Do these crawl stats seem in line with sites? Would slowing down crawl rates have a big effect on rankings? Thanks
Technical SEO | | SuperMikeLewis0 -
Do search engines still index/crawl private content?
If you have a membership site, which requires a payment to access specific content/images/videos, do search engines still use that content as a ranking/domain authority factor? Is it worth optimizing these "private" pages for SEO?
Technical SEO | | christinarule1