G'day.

Yes. I'm rather confused about the correct way of going about getting Google to crawl my images. Note: It's a photography site so I want maximum possible indexing of images.

I get an external Joomla newsletter that suggested removing images from the robots.txt file. When I did this I found the images folder in the SERPs.

Now, I didn't think that looked too good in the results.

Further, it was the images folder that was indexed, not the individual images with a snippet of text from the alt text or title tag.

So I put the images back in the robots.txt file and did a URL removal request.

But just now I read in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:



So I just dunno!

My understanding is that the robot will follow a link to a html page and besides a lot of other stuff will find a reference to an image accompanied by suitable alt text and title or even nearby text content, containing keywords (search terms).

If this is correct, then the robot doesn't need to enter the images folder in order to crawl and index my images in Google Images. Therefore, the advice to remove images from the robots.txt file was bad advice.

I'd really appreciate some comment on this.

I see the forum is pretty quiet at the moment. Hope you're all having a great holiday time. I don't expect a quick answer while members are on holiday.

Thanks.

Sorry Laurie - didn't see this [happy new year BTW] - you probably have it under control - but my understanding is that the line in the robots.txt file:
Disallow: /images/
should be removed if you want google to index your images.

In addition, to get indexed take advantage of filling in all the titles and alt text etc for your images plus name the images something relevant for the search. (but looks like you might already be doing that)

Thanks JLJ, and happy new year wishes to you, too! It's my birthday on the second so we have a double celebration here.

OK. So I'll remove the line in the robots file again: Disallow: /images/

This should allow the robot to enter the images folder and index the images.

The URL removal request that I did for the images folder should stop the indexing of the images folder but still allow indexing of the image files in the images folder.

Does that sound correct?

Thanks.

Yes that sounds about right. The best way to see what happens next is simply to watch your analytics / stats set up and also do some google image searches every now and then to see that they start coming up! (can take a few weeks - somtimes months though!!)

OK, thanks.

Now, in view of that, maybe you can set me straight on something that is distantly related:

So, I'm a member of a photography forum. I hotlink my own images on the forum. There is no alt text or title in the forum post, but I always make sure to surround the image with keywords, using a large size heading.

I imagine the image crawler comes along and sees the img tag. It follows it to my images folder and indexes the image using my nearby keywords from the forum post.

How are we doing? Is that how it goes?

Well, does any link juice flow to my site from the forum?

Does this induce the crawler to visit my site more often or to crawl deeper? It's a pretty high traffic forum.