Google Webmaster Central announced that now site owners can provide image data to Google using their XML sitemap. You can tell Google about image properties like image location, title, license, caption etc. using the XML sitemap. We suspect that soon automated xml sitemap generators will also incorporate this into their sitemap creation, although no plans have yet been announced.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
Image tag definitions:
| Tag | Required | Description |
<image:image> |
Yes | Encloses all information about a single image. Each URL (<loc> tag) can include up to 1,000 <image:image> tags. |
<image:loc> |
Yes | The URL of the image. |
<image:caption> |
Optional | The caption of the image. |
<image:geo_location> |
Optional | The geographic location of the image. For example, <image:geo_location>Limerick, Ireland</image:geo_location>. |
<image:title> |
Optional | The title of the image. |
<image:license> |
Optional | A URL to the license of the image. |
You can find more technical information about Google image sitemap here.
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Thank you for the update. Now I have to revise my sitemap.xml to include images.
I hope automated sitemap generators can generate sitemaps with image data.
This is good news and more to do for SEO work!
[...] Announcement from Google Webmaster Central via Boomtown Internet Group. [...]