By kmcewan on

Does anyone know of a reason why images stored in /imagecache/ would not be indexed by Google?

On our website we have a large number of images that use a gallery and the source of the images is /imagecache/ some of these relate to images/pages on a previous site that have all be 301 redirected. The gallery is search engine friendly so they should have been picked up by Google for display in an image search.

I can't find any images from drupal installs /imagecache/ in Google images so wondering if there is some underlying feature in how the imagecache works that prevents them being indexed.

Any thoughts/help greatly appreciated.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

gdtechindia’s picture

gdtechindia commented

no solution till now ?

B.P.B’s picture

B.P.B commented

I use CCK + imagefield + imagecache to display images on my pages. Google simply does not index them.

szy’s picture

szy commented

I haven't seen any problem with indexing CCK+Imagefield+Imagecache images of mine
in Google.

Szy.

--
Znajkraj

dman’s picture

dman commented

I see a few in Google and there's no specific reason why they shouldn't be indexed. Google may be clever enough to rank it lower, because in general imagecache images are less important than the originals.
Did you give google a few months to get around to indexing them?

.dan.
if you are asking a question you think should be documented, please provide a link to the handbook where you think the answer should be found.
| http://www.coders.co.nz/ |

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

Moto’s picture

Moto commented

noticed the robots.txt installed in the root dir sometimes blocks google from scanning folders you want it to scan... I don't think that is your problem, but it might be worth checking.

mnemonic’s picture

mnemonic commented

Thanks, Moto. Sometimes things are so easy...
Drupal default path to uploades images is /sites/default/files/imagecache/
Standard robots.txt says Disallow: /sites/

Uncomment this line - and see what happens
Drupal sites I found here http://images.google.co.nz/images?um=1&hl=en&q=sites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2... did so.

oskar_calvo’s picture

oskar_calvo commented

I have try changing the robots.txt like this:
I change

Disallow: /sites/
by
Disallow: /sites/all

And google don't index the images, We use a lot of imagecache images, now I have comment the line
Disallow: /sites/all

I Hope this let drupal index the images.

Oskar

a_c_m’s picture

a_c_m commented

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/robots.shtml

Point 6, shows that google will accept "Allow: /sites/default/files/photos/" for example. Which is much nicer than opening up the full sites folder.

Testing to see how well it works now.

iboxsolutions’s picture

iboxsolutions commented

Hi,

Just wanted to let people know that I had the same problem with my Drupal sites, particularly a photography site, where images were not appearing in Google Images.

I set the imagecache folders to 'Allow' in the robots.txt file and, after a couple of months, they are appearing the Google Images. Unfortunately Google Images does take longer to index sites but it does get there eventually.

Tim