Google Image bot not crawling

image crawling

[janwari]

A couple of months ago we launched a new website. The websites was primarily a picture gallery with 150 pages having images on each page. Careful attention was given to SEO, and so for every images appropriate Alt tag text was added, the image name related to the image and finally all the images were stored in the "images" folder of Document root.

In a month's time our site had reached #5 in SERP on Google's web search. But sadly not even a single page was indexed by Google's image bot. This in spite of adding a robots.txt files telling it to explicitly crawl all images.
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /images/
Allow: /images/*.jpg$

What else needs to be done so that Google Image Search indexes our images? I read somewhere on webmasterworld that PageRanks also affect Google's Image Search results. And since Google doesnt assign PageRank for upto 12-15 weeks could this be the reason why not even a single page hasnt been indexed?

Any insights on this issue is appreciated.

Thanks.

[menial]

Give it two more months and you should be fine.

[tedster]

Hello janwari, and welcome to the forums.

I agree with menial - image search is a strange bird, and often lags behind what regular web search might make you expect.

Your robots.txt is really overkill - but nothing wrong that Ican see, since Google does support the non-standard "Allow:" rules. If there are more rules in the robots.txt, you may want to use the robots.txt validator in Webamster Tools to be sure the overall logic is exactly what you intend.

However, if there's nothing you want to prohibit, one basic rule of "Disallow: " will do it. If your total robots.txt file is longer, you may want to be sure there are no other rules that are negating the ones you have. Here's a reference thread for that: [webmasterworld.com...]

since Google doesnt assign PageRank for upto 12-15 weeks could this be the reason why not even a single page hasnt been indexed?

Google doesn't update visible PageRank on the Toolbar but every 12-15 weeks (or more) but your pages definitely get PageRank assigned almost continually for ranking and crawling purposes. If Google finds backlinks, then you've got real PageRank.

[SteveWh]

I don't know if it affects the ability or willingness of search engines to assign text to images, but Firefox doesn't popup alt text for images when you hover over them. That's an IE thing. But FF does display title text, so for best compatibility each image should have both an alt= and a title=. The text for the image will then pop up regardless of browser, and the presence of both might provide some emphasis to search engines.

My recollection may be hazy, but I recall noticing at one point that Live Search was using my alt text for image tagging, but Google was not, using other things instead. Since my image tags were descriptive, Live's image tags were good and Google's weren't. However, Google's tags for other sites work fine, so that's not a general rule. My images do turn up in Google searches, just not always for the terms I intended or would have expected.

[janwari]

tedster, thanks for welcoming me to the forms.
And thank you all for your feedback.
Guess I will have to be patient and wait for another 2 months to see if things have changed or not.

Steve, on discussion with our SEO expert he also had mentioned about the title tags and alt tags. Therefore we are using the same text for both these tags.