abe: family, projects, ideas

Confused about Google Image Search

March 6th, 2008

Shirley Bell Designs has hundreds of beautiful images.  And Google Image search isn’t indexing them.  Why not?  Apparently it doesn’t like dynamically generated pages (ie with URL parameters and the like) in between the crawler and the image.  No problem - I created this simple image page listing every one of Shirley’s paintings with a clear title, link to a neatly formatted image and a link to the original jpg (example: black lab).  Google re-crawled the site, checked this page out (it is in the sitemap) and then decided not to index it.  Why?  Bizarre.  Guess I’ll have to dig deeper.

This is a shame though.  I imagine many gallery sites are dynamic such as this one, and if Google can’t index them it is missing out on many many images on the web.  I know I use Google Image search all the time for clip-art, etc. and yet I never realized it wasn’t doing a good job on the indexing side.

Entry Filed under: development