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
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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and a-moz.groupbuyseo.org w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Hi, trying to dig into Google News for a large site, mostly containing news.
Technical SEO | | m.m
The structure of the site network is subdomain.domain.se, and each subdomain has it's own brand with it's own news: x.domain.se
y.domain.se
z.domain.se
etc... Each brand/subdomain is more or less to equate with its own subjectfield/section. In Google News every subdomain is configured with it's own Site Source url, but also having the set up with one section with the same url. It seems like they're getting conflicts in Google News, Google can't always figure out which news article to which brand. Example: an article owned by brand A, but it is sometimes happens that articles getting labeled as brand B in the news SERP, though the link takes you correctly to brand A. I am thinking that this config in News Publisher Center may be a problem? Anyone having any thoughts if that would be better if we delete all source urls except for domain.se-brand and then put all the other subdomains as sections? www.domain.se x.domain.se y.doamin.se z.domain.se Any smart thoughts on this one? Or anything else that could make this wrong labeling (all content included images are hosted in same domain for example). Regards,
Magnus0 -
Image Search
Hello Community, I have been reading and researching about image search and trying to find patterns within the results but unfortunately I could not get to a conclusion on 2 matters. Hopefully this community would have the answers I am searching for. 1) Watermarked Images (To remove or not to remove watermark from photos) I see a lot of confusion on this subject and am pretty much confused myself. Although it might be true that watermarked photos do not cause a punishment, it sure does not seem to help. At least in my industry and on a bunch of different random queries I have made, watermarked images are hard to come by on Google's images results. Usually the first results do not have any watermarks. I have read online that Google takes into account user behavior and most users prefer images with no watermark. But again, it is something "I have read online" so I don't have any proof. I would love to have further clarification and, if possible, a definite guide on how to improve my image results. 2) Multiple nested folders (Folder depth) Due to speed concerns our tech guys are using 1 image per folder and created a convoluted folder structure where the photos are actually 9 levels deep. Most of our competition and many small Wordpress blogs outrank us on Google images and on ALL INSTANCES I have checked, their photos are 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. Never inside 9 nested folders.
Technical SEO | | Koki.Mourao
So... A) Should I consider removing the watermark - which is not that intrusive but is visible?
B) Should I try to simplify the folder structure for my photos? Thank you0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610
