I've submitted my site to google search console, and only 6 images of 89 images have been indexed in 2 weeks. Should I be worried?

[mattchew]

I've submitted my site to google search console, and only 6 images of 89 images have been indexed in 2 weeks. Should I be worried?

My site is http://bayareahomebirth.org

Images are a pretty big part of this site's content and SEO value.

Thanks for your help!

[benesmartin]

Hey Matt,

I've had a quick look at the source code and you can probably work on your ALT texts a bit to help Google with the indexation.

For example, for this image you have set "Photo Credit: eyeliam" as ALT text, which doesn't contain any relevant keywords. Google might think this image is not important for the website/topic and, therefore, decides not to index it.

Also make sure that all the pages containing images are linked between each other.

Finally, you can create Sitemap.xml for images and upload it to GWT as well.

Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin

[davebuts]

Hi Matt,

Just to clarify what Martin said, adding alt text to your images won't actually help your images get indexed, but they will help improve your rankings in image search - so they are two separate things.

If you do an image "site:" search, you'll see that 40+ of your images have been indexed: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:bayareahomebirth.org&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5_LfJ0qDUAhVIlJQKHQeFCVIQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=590&gws_rd=cr&ei=HCEyWemYKcib0gS3jIzYBw 

It's only been two weeks, so the rest of the images may just take a little bit longer.

I can also see that a lot of your images are not hosted on your domain (they're hosted with Squarespace).

If you are looking at indexed images in your Search Console account, these images will not be reported as indexed in your SC account because they are not hosted on the same SC domain - but they are actually indexed.

You can check to see if an image is indexed by pasting the image URL into image search, eg. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56b65664b09f955cb8aed482/t/56ba99d5555986520338de96/1455069653711/big%2Bpoo%2Bbig%2Bbath.jpg&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZnOif1aDUAhXFH5QKHT0PDrcQ_AUIBigB&biw=1280&bih=590

Overall, I don't think you have any issues with images being indexed - just reporting accuracy issues because some of them aren't hosted on your domain.

Cheers,

David

[mattchew]

Thank you so much Martin and David! These were very informative and helpful responses. They answered my question.