Image Maps

[corwin]

Hey forum,

I'm curious about Image Maps. Few things I'm not sure about:

1. Will the links be followed? If so, will Google respect rel="nofollow"?

2. Will the image be considered 1 image? (indexed as image, etc.) Or will each map segment be treated as a separate image?

3. Any other SEO pros\cons to consider when adding an image map to an existing page?

Thanks,

Corwin.

[KaneJamison]

1 - Can't say regarding nofollow - you could always try adding rel="nofollow" to the <area> tag and give it a shot.

Whether the links are followed depends on whether they're indexed. In my opinion, they shouldn't have any issue crawling the links. If you look at the source code of a page with an image map on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_map for example) you'll see that the links are pretty clearly listed (and in Chrome's source code view they're even hyperlinked - which alone suggests they should be crawling them just fine.)

That said, I have not tested this, and I can't find any references to actual testing done online.

If I were you, I would test this by doing the following:

1. Create an image map somewhere on your site (we'll call it the Map Page).
2. Link that image map to a 2nd page of the site that is not linked anywhere else on the Map Page.
3. Feel free to tweet the URLs of both pages to speed up the indexation process.
4. Go in to Google Webmaster Tools, and see if a link is reported to the 2nd Page from the Map Page.
5. If there isn't, double check the cache date of the Map Page to see if it's after the image map was added to the page.

• If you go through that test, and GWT doesn't report a link from the Map Page to the 2nd Page, then I would go ahead and use the image map, but I would also add text links on the page to ensure your optimal site structure is in place.
• If GWT does report the link, then that seem sufficient to me, so long as you specify the alt and title text for each individual link since that will function as your anchor text.

2 - The image will probably be considered one image as far as indexing in Google Images (would be strange if they indexed portions of the image), however the alt and title attributes should behave more like multiple images.

3 - I would just do the test I described above and you should be set. Also, take a look at what popular websites using Image Maps do in this situation. National real estate listing sites are a common one for image maps IIRC.

[corwin]

Thank you! Great info and suggestions. I'll take your advice and post here once I get the results, so others can benefit from it.

[corwin]

For people who find this and want the final results, these are what I see at my site, YMMV:

1. Links from image maps are indeed followed, Google crawls pages that are only accessible via the image map. nofollow also seems to be respected, unless Google just decided not to index these pages for another reason, but I doubt it.

2. The images are indeed indexed for Google images as one image containing the entire map. This image gets the "alt" value of the entire image, not the individual map segments.

I hope this is useful.

[KaneJamison]

Corwin - that's awesome info - thanks for posting the results of your tests!