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We have a e-commerce Magento site and we have 1000's of products and images.

But a lot of images are not indexed by Google. Only few images are indexed by Google.

When we searched in google as this: site:www.example.com images

We found only 500 images. We want to know why other images are not indexed?

Is there any image sizes need to be maintained for Google to be indexed?

Usually we maintained 350 x 350 image sizes.

Also our site images are stored in 2 different paths as path1:

media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/i/m/img24.jpg

and path2:

media/catalog/product/i/m/img24.jpg

Is there anything like it will index only from particular path?

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  • What are the [cache/index] headers being returned when an image is loaded?
    – dhaupin
    Commented Apr 27, 2016 at 14:36
  • @dhaupin this is image link
    – profile 1
    Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 5:29
  • Hmm interesting...the headers look ok...but that is a picture of a dog on a nokia product. And this site is like totally un-built. How long has this been indexed? And are these sample products? Why are all the images wrong (pet stuff on electronics)? You do know that google has image recognition right? It is most likely seeing this as low quality/thin content along with wrong images, so i would say that's your issue ;) Finish the site, put real products on, add some good content, and surely they will index.
    – dhaupin
    Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 13:41
  • sorry, i thought you wanted only for check about image urls & size and path. this is the real site
    – profile 1
    Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 13:49
  • "Usually we maintained 350 x 350 image sizes." - The majority (1,000+) of the images I see indexed for your "real site" are 1200x1200?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 21:51

4 Answers 4

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tl;dr I think your images are indexed OK, but you are simply not able to see all the images that Google has indexed.

i did search in google image search and counted the number of images. it was around only 500.

Curious, I see considerably more when performing a site: search for your real site on Google Image search.

But there are more than 500 images in Google Image Search

When performing an initial site: search there are indeed about 500 images returned (although I estimate that there are between 390 and 520 images). However, scroll to the end of the list, and there is a large button: "Show more results". Clicking that button and scrolling to the end (image lazy load) boosts this figure to between 1020 and 1360 images. (I'm counting the number of rows (approx 170) and multiplying by the min (6) and max (8) in each row - on quite a low-res screen.) All these images are 1200 x 1200 (Search tools > Show sizes).

If I then do the same site: search, but this time pick "Search tools" > "Medium" then I get a completely new set of smaller images (Mostly 350 x 350, but some 640 x 480 and 480 x 360). Again, I estimate that there are between 1020 and 1360 images returned in this search.

So, from these two searches alone I can see that you must have at least 2500 images indexed.

Google Image Search does not return all images

But, rather importantly (as I mentioned in comments above), Google Image Search does not return all the indexed images anyway when doing a site: search. There is a cut off (seemingly somewhere between 1020 and 1360 images). In the same way a site: search on normal Web Search only returns the first 100 results (10 pages). Try a site: search on any other big site (eg. site:amazon.com) and you get similar results.

There's no way to accurately determine the number of indexed images using a Google site: search, unless perhaps you don't have many images. This is by design and prevents you from pulling all the images/pages from a site using Google and examining their search status (which is "personal").

From where I'm sitting, your site images already look well indexed.

Also our site images are stored in 2 different paths

I don't think this really matters in terms of SEO. (Although it's perhaps more of an issue with client-side caching and bandwidth. And perhaps storage, if you are physically storing the same image in two separate places.)

If img24.jpg is the same image but in two separate locations, Google will (or should) only return one of them in the search results. Does it really matter which one it returns? Which is all that a canonical Link: HTTP response header would resolve. But I don't believe Google honours the rel="canonical" Link: header at the current time with regards to Image Search. Reference: Google Search Console Help - Specify a canonical link in your HTTP header

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+50

When you search for site:www.example.com images on Google, you're looking for pages on www.example.com that contain the word images. Try searching for site:www.example.com on Google Image Search.

I've seen 16x16 pixel icons on Google Image Search, so your image size shouldn't be a problem.

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  • Thanks for clearing our doubts regarding image sizes. yes, we tried as you said, but still the same result.
    – profile 1
    Commented Apr 25, 2016 at 11:02
  • @spylh9999ggr "still the same result." - Searching on normal Search and searching on Image Search should return entirely different results? Searching (erroneously) on normal Search for site:www.example.com images returns "About 17,100 results". Searching on Image Search for site:www.example.com returns in excess of 1000 images (without using the search tools to find smaller images) - this is considerably more than what you stated in the question. Also, bear in mind that a site: search won't necessarily return all the results anyway.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Apr 28, 2016 at 21:48
  • @w3dk I mean all thousands of images are not indexed. yes you are right. in normal search only few images indexed. in image search , some hundereds of images are indexed. but we have thousands of images in our site. approximately we have 20000 images in site. about 500 images are only indexed in image search
    – profile 1
    Commented Apr 29, 2016 at 5:16
  • @spylh9999ggr How are you determining how many of your images are indexed by Google?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Apr 29, 2016 at 9:40
  • @w3dk i did search in google image search and counted the number of images. it was around only 500.
    – profile 1
    Commented Apr 29, 2016 at 16:56
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"Is there anything like it will index only from particular path?" It sounds like you want a "canonical URL" for each image. That's smart; it may help "improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication" (to quote the source below).

Google has an article on this: Use canonical URLs

A search for "magento canonical urls" returns several promising results. Perhaps start with this one: How to Add Rel Canonical in Magento

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A Magento 2.x 2.1.x and 2.2.x have major SEO flaws in how they handle images that make it hard for Google to index the site.

1) The images listed in the sitemap do not exist on the product page. Magento needs to fix this by making the image from the sitemap the image on the product page.

2) Next issue is magento uses 6 different cached images on the product page. This is bad because it confuses google, and if you ever clean your image class these image urls could change.

3) Final issue is the lazy load some plugins use is not SEO friendly.

Source: 14 years SEO expertise and SEO knowledge. I also have a Magento 2.1.x and 2.2.x store that was experiencing these same issues.

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