Image Duplicates - Does Google Penalize on this?

[RanjeetP]

Hi Mozzers,

I have some doubts on the images hosted on my site. I have a single image on the website coming from 3 different locations. The locations are:

img.mydomain.com/site/default/serivces.jpg

img1.mydomain.com/site/default/serivces.jpg

www.mydomain.com/site/default/serivces.jpg

Now, these 3 are the same images with the same Title (they currently do not have an Alt Tag). Now, the 2 sub-domains when opened without any internal URL, redirects to the main domain.

For instance, if I access img.mydomain.com it 301 redirects to www.mydomain.com but if I access img.mydomain.com/site/default/serivces.jpg I will get the image and it does not redirect. I have checked Google Image search and the full path on the sub-domain of the image is being indexed and crawled by Google Image bot.

Now, this is true for both the sub-domains which act as CDN for the images. If Google does crawl all the locations which have the same image, does it cause a duplicate issue for it?

I know that if it was content, I would be in trouble but does image also has the same implications. I am planning for image optimization and faced with this situation.

Any answers?

Cheers,

[NakulGoyal]

Do you have an Image Sitemap created and submitted in your webmaster console ? If not, I would suggest you do that. Other then that, if I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about this being an issue at the moment. Google is smart enough to understand this as a CDN situation. As I said above, doing an Images XML sitemap should be all you need to do in this regard. I hope this helps.

[JesseCWalker]

Nakul, would you recommend this practice to all sites with a decent number of images?  Or is it only important in this case?

[SharewarePros]

Dear Nakul,

About the image sitemap, what do you recommend :

1. use the attribute on the current sitemap withing the prop or build a separate sitemap for images.

To be honest Im not sure what is the best way and Im worry about sitemap related issues

Waiting your response

Claudio

[RanjeetP]

Thanks for the response Nakul. So, in the image sitemap, would you recommend to add all the locations of the images or should I just mention only one. If one, which should be that and any reasons for choosing the same. If this does not cause a duplicate issue, it is fine with me.

For better indexation I can certainly have a sitemap but would like to know on how to go about this?

Cheers,

[NakulGoyal]

Jesse, yes, I would recommend doing this for any site with a considerable number of images. If you want your images to be found, it won't hurt to do an image sitemap. Definitely recommended. Google webmaster console then gives you a good read on how many of the images you submitted are already indexed as well as a count of the pages those images are on, that are indexed.

[NakulGoyal]

Akhil, at any given point, there's only 1 of those 3 URLs of the images that would appear on the site. I would therefore only choose 1, the one that is primary / most important to you.

[NakulGoyal]

Claudio, I would recommend doing a separate images only sitemap in the right format. See these links for more details:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-images-to-your-sitemaps.html

[RanjeetP]

Thanks Nakul. That solves the issue.

Cheers,

[JesseCWalker]

Looks like there is enough interest here for a full blog entry on image sitemaps.  Nakul?  Anyone?

[NakulGoyal]

Let me try and give it a shot...it might be my 1st SEOMoz article. Good idea...Cheers Jesse.

[JesseCWalker]

Cheers Nagul!

Give it a go.  And let me know when you get ready to publish it and I'll share it around.  It would really be quite a useful topic to learn about.