Google images

[RichardTay]

Hi,

I am working on a website with a large number (millions) of images. For the last five months Ihave been trying to get Google Images to crawl and index these images (example page: http://bit.ly/1ePQvyd).  I believe I have followed best practice in the design of the page, naming of images etc. Whilst crawlng and indexing of the pages is going reasonably well with the standard crawler, the image bot has only crawled about half a million images and indexed only about 40,000.

Can anyone suggest what I could do to increase this number 100 fold?

Richard

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Richard,

Have you tried submitting image sitemap files to both Google Webmaster Tools as Bing Webmaster Tools. It's probably related to your crawl budget that Google is not crawling the millions of images on your site. That's why they maybe also can't found more than these pages.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I don't know about a 100-fold increase, but as Martijn said, an image sitemap will certainly help. You can often build images into the standard sitemap, but with so many images, you are best keeping these separate.

Something else I would look to do, is change the page Title structure. Currently, this says:
"The sky begins to lighten during morning twilight behind a suspension tower of the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. - DYFXET | Alamy"

There is no mention here of photography, royalty free, stock images, etc.

I would be cutting the description of the image down so it looked something like this:

"The sky begins to lighten during morning twilight behind a suspension tower... Royalty free stock photography | Alamy"

Look at others who do well in stock image searches (Shutterstock, 123rf, etc.) and match some of what they do.

-Andy

[RichardTay]

Thanks for looking at this.

We are adding sitemaps "slowly" - ie 10 million at a time. eg: http://bit.ly/RDHmyo

This stemap was submitted about 14 days ago and has had about 2 million pages indexed but only 5,000 images indexed.

We will add another this week.

I think you may well be right about crawl budget. I have ensured that the bots are almost exclusively focused on these pages (well over 90% of crawls are of these pages). I am assuming that the only way t increase budget is to increase authority. Is that right?

[RichardTay]

Thanks,

I think we could sharpen up the title and some other things.

However, we are doing reasonably well with indexing of pages - it's the images that seem to be so slow.

We do have image sitemaps (eg http://bit.ly/RDHmyo) but our experiments show that this is not much help.

This sitemap above was submitted about 14 days ago and has had about 2 million pages indexed but only 5,000 images indexed.

It feels like I have my foot on the hose pipe

Richard

[RichardTay]

Hi,

Thanks for those who have offered advice so far.

I am looking an buy the services of an SEO expert with experience in getting vast numbers of images indexed by Google Images. If that is you or you know someone who could help, get in touch.

Richard

[JaneCopland]

Hi Richard,

I'm not a Google Images expert (otherwise I'd offer to help!) but you could check out the companies / individuals listed on Moz's <a>Recommended Providers page</a>. Many are agencies that prefer to work with people on longer retainers, but you may find someone to work with there, or the people listed may be able to point you to a trusted contact who specialises in images.

I haven't heard of people specifically specialising in image search but that doesn't mean those people don't exist, or that you won't find someone who has a lot of experience with image-heavy photography / art websites.

Cheers,

Jane