Invest in a Image Sitemap - Yes or No?

[rpaiva]

Hey Mozers,

2 part question

1. I'm reaching out to see if you all think Image Sitemaps are totally worth it for a big company.  I can totally understand its value for a smaller mom & pop company.  With a larger company they would have way more products so is it worth it having an image site map?

2. I cant find examples of image sitemaps online.  Would you be able to provide a website that is doing it?  I can only find video sitemaps.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Depends on if they have lots of high quality, unique, keyword optimized images that can drive traffic through image search.

Sample image sitemap: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/sitemap_images.xml

There are lots of image sitemap generators available as well (free for smaller sites, not sure about larger sites). I like to use ScreamingFrog (paid) for large websites.

[Mobilio]

1. Yes - you should invest in image sitemap because this is fastest way for crawler to see changes in your site.

2. Here is it official documentation:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
and here is XSD for this XML
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1/sitemap-image.xsd

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

1. Yes, the bigger the company the more I'd say it would be worth it to look into as you probably will start having issues with crawl budget and driving authority to certain places on your site.
2. In most sites images might already be embedded in a normal sitemap, you can check out ours at: http://thenextweb.com/sitemap_index.xml.

[rpaiva]

Hey Martijn,

Thank you for your response, our website is going to grow 10 folds soon and we are going to be coming across some crawl budgeting issues.  I checked our your sitemap and its very sophisticated "Tip my hat".  The only thing is I didn't see image urls within your sitemap.

[rpaiva]

Thank you Peter,

Would you happen to be able to provide any actual websites that are utilizing image sitemaps? I cant seem to find any.

[rpaiva]

Thank you Oleg,

I appreciate your quick response.  I do plan on move forward with image sitemaps but would you be able to provide any websites that are currently utilizing image sitemaps?

[Mobilio]

Yes,

mine site comes with this sitemap:
http://www.mobiliodevelopment.com/post-sitemap.xml
http://www.mobiliodevelopment.com/page-sitemap.xml

They're automated generated from Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

PS: Just right click and select "View Source"

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Rodrigo,

Ah I didn't realise we're using XLST so you're not seeing the source code but only the marked up versions for the stye sheets. I would recommend to check the source code of this URL for example: http://thenextweb.com/post-sitemap71.xml it will show you the image:loc tags for almost every URL.