Why are my images not being indexed?

[nicole2014]

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?

www.creative-calendars.com

[SEO-Buzz]

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.

[nicole2014]

The site map was submitted at least 6 months ago. All of the pages/posts have been indexed but not the images.

[SEO-Buzz]

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!

[nicole2014]

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?

[webmethod]

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

[DougRoberts]

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.

[nicole2014]

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.

[Carson-Ward]

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.