Google only indexed 19/94 images

[Edward_Sturm]

I'm using Yoast SEO and have images (attachments) excluded from sitemaps, which is the recommended method (but could this be wrong?).

Most of my images are in my posts; here's the sitemap for posts: https://edwardsturm.com/post-sitemap.xml

I also appear on p1 for some good keywords, and my site is getting organic traffic, so I'm not sure why the images aren't being indexed. Here's an example of a well performing article: https://edwardsturm.com/best-games-youtube-2016/

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Edward,

No, it is recommended not to list your attachment pages as the quality of these pages are very low so that's why you don't want them to be included in the SERPs.
Usually image indexation can be a problem for bigger sites. Our indexation rate is a little bit bigger then yours but for now we also have less then 50% of our images indexed and that's tens of thousands of images at the moment. Somehow Google doesn't find most of the images relevant to its users. What you could do to improve this is make sure there is always some relevant information around the image available.

Hope this helps!?

[Edward_Sturm]

Thanks. The strange thing is that it appears that only my post images aren't being indexed. My Facebook and Twitter images are, but the images that appear in the actual post are not, making it seem like this is purely a technical issue.

[evolvingSEO]

Edward

In the big picture, Martijin is right - unless you need traffic from the images, it's OK they are not indexed.

But secondly, looks like they are hosted on wp.com like this one - https://i2.wp.com/edwardsturm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Reddit-Gaming-Front-Page.png?resize=860%2C883&ssl=1

They show up in my crawl OK, but have you tried a "fetch and render" in Google Search Console? I would do that on any of your blog posts and see if the render shows the images.

My guess is it's not an issue for you, but maybe something wp.com is blocking access to, or not allowing indexation on.

[Edward_Sturm]

Thanks Dan. I've figured out that I'm having problems because I'm using a CDN. I'm finding a workaround to this right now.

[Edward_Sturm]

For anybody wondering, the problem is stemming from me using the Photon CDN by the Jetpack plugin. Photon is great, it really enhances UX, and their support is pretty top of the line, but since I put a lot of work into my post images, I'd like them to be indexed.

I'm going to try switching to AWS, because I see that that's what Moz is using.

[evolvingSEO]

Thanks for following up!