I have over 5,000 to 10,000 photos on my website and I am considering creating an image sitemap that I will add to my WMT. Is that a good idea or is the fact there is so many images in my sitemap can cause any problem?
tedster
8:45 pm on May 18, 2013 (gmt 0)
That's certainly not too many - I've seen a lot higher.
virtualreality
7:16 am on May 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
Thanks tedster. Most of my images are in js photo galleries so when I create the sitemap there is no alt text on most of them. What is the best to do in this case? If I add alt text in the sitemap for each image would that be ok having in mind there is no alt text on the page where the image is, because as I said it comes from a js file?
tedster
9:46 pm on May 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
An xml image sitemap can contain an optional "title" field, and Google will see it. How much use they make of that data, I'm not sure - I never tested it. There's also an optional "caption" field, but to use it honestly you should have a caption displayed on the page, too - makes using it almost superfluous.
netmeg
10:02 pm on May 19, 2013 (gmt 0)
If you're hoping to get traffic this way, you might be disappointed. A lot of people have lost significant traffic with the recent changes to the way images are served.
virtualreality
5:35 am on May 20, 2013 (gmt 0)
In addition of an image xml sitemap I also have txt and xml sitemaps for my urls submitted to my WMT. I was not sure if it is a good idea to submit both xml and txt sitemaps or only xml?
tedster
12:13 pm on May 20, 2013 (gmt 0)
Either one is plenty. See [support.google.com...] As I read that, the two are alternative choices - with the .txt file being a courtesy to sites that would have difficulty generating the xml protocol version.
[edited by: tedster at 5:15 pm (utc) on May 20, 2013]
