Why Aren't My Images Being Indexed?

[SEOdub]

Hi,

One of my clients submitted an image sitemap with 465 images. It was submitted on July 20 2017 to Google Search Console.

None of the submitted images have been indexed.

I'm wondering why?

Here's the image sitemap: http://www.tagible.com/images_sitemap.xml We do use a CDN for the images, and the images are hosted on a subdomain of the client's site: ex. https://photos.tagible.com/images/Les_Invalides_Court_Of_Honor.jpg

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Julian

[DonnaDuncan]

It might be a permissions problem.

You have said the sitemap is here - http://www.tagible.com/images_sitemap.xml, which it is. But the robots.txt file (http://www.tagible.com/robots.txt) does not include that sitemap. It has 10 others, but not that one.

If one goes to the subdomain (https://photos.tagible.com/) or folder (https://photos.tagible.com/images/) where the images are hosted, there is a 403 (forbidden) return code. Crawlers may not be able to navigate to the folder with the images. The images themselves are accessible with a 200 return code, but not the subdomain or folder where they are stored.

I don't know if you're aware of it, but tagible.com, www.tagible.com, and photos.tagible.com are not redirecting to their https equivalents.

[davebuts]

Hi Julian,

The reason your GSC account isn't reporting your images as indexed is that they are on a different subdomain to your GSC account - GSC will only report indexed URLs that are on the exact subdomain of that account.

And are the images actually used on the site? None of them showed up in a Screaming Frog crawl...

Cheers,

David

[SEOdub]

Thanks Donna! I could see the 403 errors being an issue, as well as the robots.txt file not including the sitemap. I hadn't thought of that.

We're working on making sure the https issue is fixed.

[SEOdub]

Thanks David! That definitely makes sense. We claimed photos.tagible.com in GSC, so hopefully that does it.

And yes, they are, but in an unusual way: http://tagible.com/project/denver-colorado/