Indexing ajax generated images

5 replies
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Hi all hope you're doing good

Today i had to look for a way that would help me index images that are fetched by ajax, so i started Googling and found some information about infinite scroll and how Google would like you to handle it, but i do not think this would help me so let me explain exactly what is the problem and what i have so far regarding a solution.

The Problem
At the moment i have a page where users can view images of a business but to reduce the loading time i have limited the amount of images displayed to 5, this is user uploaded images so they can get a lot and displaying them all will just kill loading time and use pointless bandwidth, so if you would like to view more images there is a "show more" button which will get all the remaining images for that business.

As you can imagine our friend Google does not have the ability to run all the click events and index the content that will be returned.

What i'm thinking of and trying to work out
Google's suggestion for the infinite scrolling is to create paginated pages which Google indexes, so lets say you have 3 pages, Google will index all three and how you need to handle this is to take all three pages as a position of the entire infinite scroll, this way allowing the user to get the content he actually searched for on Google and not having to scroll through miles of content just to miss the content he was looking for.

So now you have 3 pages and your on page two, and if you want page ones content you need to scroll up and as you enter the first page's content you change the URL to the first pages URL (without actually reloading that page just changing it's URL) and the same if your going down to the third page.

Okay that was for the people who did not understand the explanation Google has on it's webmaster help section

Now i don't see this working for the images i have because i can't change the URL just to index images so i thought of making that show more button a link which Google can follow and index all the images fetched for that business, then canonical back to the business page, and just prevent the link from working with jQuery and the user will not see it the same as Google.

But my problem i have with that is that Google will still index that page with all the images because canonical is more of a suggestion not a sure thing to work.

If anyone has a suggestion on how to handle this i would be really thankful, if you have more questions just ask

I really hope i have explained everything correctly and could help you understand my problem, thank you for reading i know it's long but better that and you understand what i need then giving you not enough information.

Thanks again
#ajax #generated #images #indexing
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    There's other options:
    • image.xml sitemap for indexing images.
    • Fixed top/side/bottom navigation with thumbnail images or links to images.
    • CSS/HTML Slideout (example) with additional thumbnail images or links to those images.

    Make sure to look at the text version of the webpage (example) because that's what Google is looking at.
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    • Profile picture of the author LOOM101
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      There's other options:
      • image.xml sitemap for indexing images.
      • Fixed top/side/bottom navigation with thumbnail images or links to images.
      • CSS/HTML Slideout (example) with additional thumbnail images or links to those images.

      Make sure to look at the text version of the webpage (example) because that's what Google is looking at.
      Hi yukon thanks for the bullet points

      The first one looks like it can help but the only problem i have is that there is a limit to the amount of images i can "Link" to a set URL, they have a limit of a 1000, the problem is that users can add over time more then a 1000 images so that will only help to a point. But still something i'm looking into.

      A question though, does Google not need to be able to see (crawl) the image on the page before being able to display the results on there search? because if so then it will not work because that image is behind ajax and Google will not be able to crawl it and will skip it even if you have it on the site map.

      The Second one i take is like a Google maps type of nav bar which displays the thumbnails to the images and you scroll through them, my problem still exists with this setup because i will still need to load the content (images) dynamically because it can be thousands of images.

      The last point has the same problem as the second one as it will not help me if i have that amount of images.

      Something i must have explained in the first post is the amount of images that can exist on a business page is a lot, when you click the show more button you will get a lightbox with lets say 20 images and once you scroll down more you will have a infinite scroll till the end of the images.

      Thanks again for your reply
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    The image xml sitemap could be broken up into months or whatever.
    • domain.com/imagesitemap1.xml
    • domain.com/imagesitemap2.xml
    • domain.com/imagesitemap3.xml
    • etc...

    Add a parent sitemap.xml file that links to all the indvidual xml sitemaps.

    That's how some of the BIG video sites handle their webpages. Example, this parent page list tons of sitemaps: http://www.dailymotion.com/map-regular.xml

    If most of the individual user images are similar I would only focus on a small handful of images per user & just bury the rest. Assumes you have thousands of user profiles submitting thousands of images.

    I also have no idea what niche/business your in so that's the best I can suggest.
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    • Profile picture of the author LOOM101
      Okay so basically have a sitemap that points to multiple sitemaps, that looks promising but i still have the question, does Google not need to crawl the page the images are on and look for them?

      If so it will still not work because like i said before it's behind ajax which the crawler will not be able to access the images and will not use them in the search.

      Thanks again for your help it's really appreciated.
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  • Profile picture of the author Microsys
    Google has some guidelines as well for making AJAX pages crawlable
    https://developers.google.com/webmas...etting-started
    e.g. A1 Sitemap Generator also supports this (but if you have millions of pages/images - it may be better to generate sitemaps from a database)
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