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.
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
-
Hi,
I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example:
This is a page of a hotel in booking.com:
http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html
When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg
My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
-
Hi Dirk,
Thank you very much for your answer!
-
Google is indexing both - the url which is referring to the image & the image of the url itself. So yes - you can use two different domains. The domain that only contains the images will normally not be indexed (there is nothing to crawl there - the images are only accessible through the main domain).
Personally, if image search is important for you I would never put the images on a domain that you don't own (like e.g. an amazon s3 url). This isn't the case for Booking - the are also owner of the bstatic domain. The reason why they use this domain is probably performance related. Note that they also redirect the root of bstatic.com to booking.com.
Dirk
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 show number of products in your Google SERP?
I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM
Technical SEO | | promodirect0 -
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Hi, trying to dig into Google News for a large site, mostly containing news.
Technical SEO | | m.m
The structure of the site network is subdomain.domain.se, and each subdomain has it's own brand with it's own news: x.domain.se
y.domain.se
z.domain.se
etc... Each brand/subdomain is more or less to equate with its own subjectfield/section. In Google News every subdomain is configured with it's own Site Source url, but also having the set up with one section with the same url. It seems like they're getting conflicts in Google News, Google can't always figure out which news article to which brand. Example: an article owned by brand A, but it is sometimes happens that articles getting labeled as brand B in the news SERP, though the link takes you correctly to brand A. I am thinking that this config in News Publisher Center may be a problem? Anyone having any thoughts if that would be better if we delete all source urls except for domain.se-brand and then put all the other subdomains as sections? www.domain.se x.domain.se y.doamin.se z.domain.se Any smart thoughts on this one? Or anything else that could make this wrong labeling (all content included images are hosted in same domain for example). Regards,
Magnus0 -
Is Google caching date same as crawling/indexing date?
If a site is cached on say 9 oct 2012 doesn't that also mean that Google crawled it on same date ? And indexed it on same date?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Google News URL Format
Hi, We are currently redesigning our gaming website (www.totallygn.com) and one of our main goals is to get listed by Google News in future. Looking at the Google News URL requirements "The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits." How does the above affect SEO structure? I was planning on using a format such as www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review how would this compare to something like? www.totallygn.com/xbox-360/360-reviews/fifa-12-review234 Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | WalesDragon0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610