Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
-
Hi,
I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example:
This is a page of a hotel in booking.com:
http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html
When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg
My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
-
Hi Dirk,
Thank you very much for your answer!
-
Google is indexing both - the url which is referring to the image & the image of the url itself. So yes - you can use two different domains. The domain that only contains the images will normally not be indexed (there is nothing to crawl there - the images are only accessible through the main domain).
Personally, if image search is important for you I would never put the images on a domain that you don't own (like e.g. an amazon s3 url). This isn't the case for Booking - the are also owner of the bstatic domain. The reason why they use this domain is probably performance related. Note that they also redirect the root of bstatic.com to booking.com.
Dirk
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
-
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site
Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png
Technical SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Google stopped crawling my site. Everybody is stumped.
This has stumped the Wordpress staff and people in the Google Webmasters forum. We are in Google News (have been for years), and so new posts are crawled immediately. On Feb 17-18 Crawl Stats dropped 85%, and new posts were no longer indexed (not appearing on News or search). Data highlighter attempts return "This URL could not be found in Google's index." No manual actions by Google. No changes to the website; no custom CSS. No Site Errors or new URL errors. No sitemap problems (resubmitting didn't help). We're on wordpress.com, so no odd code. We can see the robot.txt file. Other search engines can see us, as can social media websites. Older posts still index, but loss of News is a big hit. Also, I think overall Google referrals are dropping. We can Fetch the URL for a new post, and many hours later it appears on Google and News, and we can then use Data Highlighter. It's now 6 days and no recovery. Everybody is stumped. Any ideas? I just joined, so this might be the wrong venue. If so, apologies.
Technical SEO | | Editor-FabiusMaximus_Website0 -
Google Cache showing a different URL
Hi all, very weird things happening to us. For the 3 URLs below, Google cache is rendering content from a different URL (sister site) even though there are no redirects between the 2 & live page shows the 'right content' - see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/tours/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/about/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://giltedgeafrica.com/about/team/ We also have the exact same issue with another domain we owned (but not anymore), only difference is that we 301 redirected those URLs before it changed ownership: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.preferredsafaris.com/Kenya/2 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.preferredsafaris.com/accommodation/Namibia/5 I have gone ahead into the URL removal Tool and got denied for the first case above ("") and it is still pending for the second lists. We are worried that this might be a sign of duplicate content & could be penalising us. Thanks! ps: I went through most questions & the closest one I found was this one (http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/page-disappeared-from-google-index-google-cache-shows-page-is-being-redirected) but it didn't provide a clear answer on my question above
Technical SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
Blocked URL parameters can still be crawled and indexed by google?
Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | | kaje0 -
Google is Showing Website as "Untitled"
My freelance designer made some changes to my website and all of a sudden my homepage was showing the title I have in Dmoz. We thought maybe the NOODP tag was not correct, so we edited that a little and now the site is showing as "Untitled". The website is http://www.chemistrystore.com/. Of course he didn't save an old copy that we can revert to. That is a practice that will end. I have no idea why the title and description that we have set for the homepage is not showing in google when it previously was. Another weird thing that I noticed is that when I do ( site:chemistrystore.com ) in Google I get the https version of the site showing with the correct title and description. When I do ( site:www.chemistrystore.com ) in Google I don't have the hompage showing up from what I can tell, but there are 4,000+ pages to the site. My guess is that if it is showing up, it is showing up as "Untitled". My question is.... How can we get Google to start displaying the proper title and description again?
Technical SEO | | slangdon0 -
Google.ca is showing our US site instead of our Canada Site
When our Canadian users who search on google.ca for our brand (e.g. Travelocity, Travelocity hotels, etc.), the first few results our from our US site (travelocity.com) rather than our Canadian site (travelocity.ca). In Google Webmaster Tools, we've adjusted the geotargeting settings to focus on the appropriate locale, but the wrong country TLD is still coming up at the top via google.ca. What's the best way to ensure our Canadian site comes up instead of the US site on google.ca? Thanks, Tory Smith
Technical SEO | | travelocitysearch
Travelocity0