Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
-
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping.
My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files.
Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled?
Thanks all!
-
I did this accidentally as well recently and had 100% of my products disallowed from google shopping within 48 hours. Sounds like it's not an option. They need the crawl your images folder to make sure you have valid images in you product listings.
-
if your rankings are improving, then good move!
-
Hey Richard,
We were previously blocking googlebot from crawling our images at all (through disallowing /img/ and /imgp/ in robots.txt file. We removed this block after recieving this email from Google:
Thank you for participating in Google Product Search. It has come to our attention that a robots.txt file is preventing us from crawling some or all of the images on your site. In order for us to access and display the images you provide in your product listings, we'd like you to modify your robots.txt file to allow user-agent 'googlebot' to crawl your site.
_Failure for Google to access your images may affect the visibility of your items on Google Product Search and Product Ad results. _
While I totally agree that image traffic will not convert like standard traffic, it is free and who knows, we may just pick up a few sales from it. Of course if this comes at the cost of eating up a disproportionate amount of our crawl allowance relative to the value (or avoiding any penalties from Google Product Search) we'd be better off leaving the block on.
By way of an update, it looks like our rankings have started to improve in Google product search. We first experienced a drop in rankings and traffic from Product Search on 4/16 and removed the block from robots.txt on 4/22.
-
Why do you need Google to reach inside your img folder? Images display on the page and are indexed then. Sure, if you are selling images, then I can see the need for this, but to just crawl the img folder??
If it is not huge, I do not see it penalizing you. I would make sure all images are named using keywords as crawling pic001.jpg, pic002.jpg, product01.jpg, logo.gif will not do you any good anyway.
Also I find bad linking coming from Google image searches. No one searches to purchase a coffee cup and looks in Google images to do so. Conversely, if someone is searching images of coffee cups to use in whatever, having them click over to your site is a waste of time. They are just going to grab the image and go leaving your metrics a mess.
I hope that helps.
-
It may effect crawl allowance but depends on the size of your site, page rank and trust etc.
One of the best ways to determine crawl depth and whether you have any issues is to create separate sitemaps for your most important content or areas of your site. You could also create an image sitemap.
Then you can monitor these over time and and will give you a good picture of which content is being crawled and indexed well and which content/images are not. This may also help you to find out if the site structure is too deep or whether you need to link more to deeper content in order to improve crawling and indexation.
Hope this helps.
-
Personally, I wouldn't try to figure out the impact by looking at crawl stats. I'd be more focused on end results. Have we had an increase in organic traffic, or conversions from Google shopping since we opened it up, or has either of these gone down?
That's what matters, and is the only real indicator as to whether it was a wise move or not.
-
You could check your server stats on who is accessing your site, this should tell you what bots are going to your pages when. I don't know what control panel you are using for your site, but if you are using Cpanel, I am sure there are tutorials online to help you find this information.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hidden H1 Tag on Image
Hi, In the page I'm working on, I encountered an tag in an image, rather than in a text form. Do you think it's an issue when it comes to SEO?
Technical SEO | | nerdieb
What do you suggest I should do if there is an issue? Keen to hear from you!0 -
Duplicate Content/Similar Pages
Hello, I'm working on our site and I'm coming into an issue with the duplicate content. Our company manufactures heavy-duty mobile lifts. We have two main lifts. They are the same, except for capacity. We want to keep the format similar and the owner of the company wants each lift to have its own dedicated page. Obviously, since the layout is the same and content is similar I'm getting the duplicate content issue. We also have a section of our accessories and a section of our parts. Each of these sections have individual pages for the accessory/part. Again, the pages are laid out in a similar fashion to keep the cohesiveness, and the content is different, however similar. Meaning different terminology, part numbers, stock numbers, etc., but the overall wording is similar. What can I do to combat these issues? I think our ratings are dropping due to the duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | slecinc0 -
Images on Website for SEO
Good Morning, We have a magento website with hundreds of different products that have slight size variations. The image for each of these products looks the same (the only difference between the products is some of the dimensions) .... Would you recommend using the same image for each of these products and just use a generic file name that describes the overall product or would you give each product its own image with it's specific product name as the file name? Should I use 1 image for 500 different sku's or should i rename the file the name of each individual sku and load an individual image? The end user will not know the difference since all of the images will appear identical, simply asking from an SEO perspective. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Wistia video rich snippet thumbnail images
Hi there, I just wondered if anyone on the forum had experience of using Wistia video rich snippets and how to control the thumbnail image that appears in SERPs? I have selected a thumbnail with the video information on the Wistia account, but a different one actually appears in the results pages (the image being used doesn't actually appear on the page at all, but it is elsewhere on the site). Has anyone had anything similar and what did you do the control the thumbnail being used? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Best way to create a shareable dynamic infographic - Embed / Iframe / other?
Hi all, After searching around, there doesn't seem to be any clear agreement in the SEO community of the best way to implement a shareable dynamic infographic for other people to put into their site. i.e. That will pass credit for the links to the original site. Consider the following example for the web application that we are putting the finishing touches on: The underlying site has a number of content pages that we want to rank for. We have created a number of infogrpahics showing data overlayed on top of a google map. The data continuously changes and there are javascript files that have to load in order to achieve the interactivity. There is one infographic per page on our site and there is a link at the bottom of the infographic that deep links back to each specific page on our site. What is the ideal way to implement this infographic so that the maximum SEO value is passed back to our site through the links? In our development version we have copied the youtube approach implemented this as an iframe. e.g. <iframe height="360" width="640" src="http://www.tbd.com/embed/golf" frameborder="0"></iframe>. The link at the bottom of that then links to http://www.tbd.com/golf This is the same approach that Youtube uses, however I'm nervous that the value of the link wont pass from the sites that are using the infographic. Should we do this as an embed object instead, or some other method? Thanks in advance for your help. James
Technical SEO | | jtriggs0 -
Image Sitemap Indexing Issue
Hello Folks, I've been running into some strange issues with our XML Sitemaps. The XML Sitemaps won't open on a browser and it throws the following error instead of opening the XML Sitemap. Sample XML Sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gzError - "XML Parsing Error: no element foundLocation: http://www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xmlLine Number 1, Column 1:"2) Image files are not getting indexed. For instance, the sitemap - www.veer.com/sitemap/images/Sitemap0.xml.gz has 6,000 URLs and 6,000 Images. However, only 3,481 URLs and 25 images are getting indexed. The sitemap formatting seems good, but I can't figure out why Google's de-indexing the images and only 50-60% of the URLs are getting indexed. Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | CorbisVeer0 -
Linklicious and Crawl rates
Can somebody please explain me what is 'crawl rate' and how does 'linklicious' help us with it? I mean I can always visit the website and know more about it, but I want to understand the concept. Please help.
Technical SEO | | KS__0 -
How do I redirect index.html to the root / ?
The site I've inherited had operated on index.html at one point, and now uses index.php for the home page, which goes to the / page. The index.html was lost in migrating server hosts. How do I redirect the index.html to the / page? I've tried different options that keep giving ending up with the same 404 error. I tried a redirect from index.html to index.php which ended in an infinite loop. Because the index.html no longer exists in the root, should I created it and then add a redirect to it? Can I avoid this by editing the .htaccess? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0