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How to fix Image Index SEO Issue for MaxCDN and WordPress in Google Search Console – Avoid Duplicate Content Penalty

Updated on by App  

Image Index issue because of MaxCDN image links - duplicate content panalty by Google

Take a look at an image index issue in above image. Here is second screenshot.

Nearly zero(0) images indexed before and somehow I missed it for so many months and trust me that’s not a good feeling. It’s also bad for the blog. I would say it’s a major CDN SEO impact.

In addition to below questions do you also have MaxCDN and image index issue? I would say then you are at right place.

  • Zero image indexed in Google Search console?
  • Want to have better image SEO with rel=”canonical”?
  • Want Google To Index Your Website Images When Using CDN?
  • Want to Setup MaxCDN with WordPress Blog Without Duplicate Issue?
  • SEO CDN, SEO sitemap, MaxCDN and WordPress image issue??
  • Does a CDN affect search rankings?

Please follow all below mentioned critical steps carefully to fix image index issue in Google Search Console.

But why Google Penalty?

  • With CDN, your site URLs loads over CDN URLs.
    • https://cdn.crunchify.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Go-to-SEO-tab-at-MaxCDN-and-enable-Canonical-Header.png
  • When you generate your sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml and submit to google via Search Console then it has all image URLs without CDN:
    • https://crunchify.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Go-to-SEO-tab-at-MaxCDN-and-enable-Canonical-Header.png
  • Google finds those are duplicate contents and start removing those URLs from the index.

What are we going to do?

  • We will fix sitemap_index.xml file
  • Replace image URL from crunchify.com to cdn.crunchify.com
  • We will perform all below settings including rel="canonical" URL setting

Let’s get started:

Step-1

Since last 4 years, I’ve been running my WordPress site Crunchify with 4 different CDN custom domains (CNAMEs).

  • cdn.crunchify.com
  • cdn1.crunchify.com
  • cdn2.crunchify.com
  • cdn3.crunchify.com

In order to fix this image SEO issue, it was essential to have unique URL for all my images. That’s the reason I got rid off all except cdn.crunchify.com custom domain.

The reason I’ve added more custom domains before is to make sure that browser loads all resources in parallel with different domains. If it’s a single domain then request will be piled up and may increase page load time.

It’s been over two weeks and I haven’t seen any slow site performance because of just one custom domain cdn.crunchify.com.

All latest browsers are equipped with downloading resources in parallel and you shouldn’t even worry about having more custom CDN domains.

MaxCDN - just keep 1 custom domain name - Crunchify Tips

Step-2

  • Go to SEO tab at MaxCDN and enable Canonical Header checkbox.
  • You don't have to enable robots.txt file.
Go to SEO tab at MaxCDN and enable Canonical Header
  • Above setting will add rel="canonical" on all images loaded on your site. Take a look at below HTML Header element.
rel=canonical HTML attribute added to all loaded CDN URLs

Step-3

Add and verify your custom domain to Google Search Console (Webmaster tools). i.e. cdn.crunchify.com.

Add custom domain for CDN to Google Search Console

Step-4

NOTE: Below step is only for folks who is using WordPress Yoast SEO plugin.

By default, Yoast SEO plugin creates image URL with honoring CDN URL. We are going to change it to point to CDN. Open your WordPress theme’s functions.php file and add below code into it.

function crunchify_maxcdn_image_seo_fix( $uri ) {
return str_replace( 'https://crunchify.com', 'https://cdn.crunchify.com', $uri );
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_xml_sitemap_img_src', 'crunchify_maxcdn_image_seo_fix' );

Basically – we are just replacing https://crunchify.com with https://cdn.crunchify.com

Step-5 Disable and Enable Sitemap

  • Go to SEO -> XML Sitemap Tab of Yoast SEO plugin
  • Click on Disabled XML sitemap functionality selector
  • Click Save
  • Click on Enabled XML sitemap functionality selector
  • Click Save again
  • This will regenerate sitemap_index.xml file

Step-6

Visit your sitemap URL. Here is a sample:

  • Visit https://crunchify.com/sitemap_index.xml
  • Select post-sitemap.xml: https://crunchify.com/post-sitemap.xml
  • Right click on page and click View Page Source
  • Look for <image:image> tag and see difference below

Before:

WordPress sitemap.xml before making SEO changes - without CDN URLs - Image SEO issue

After:

WordPress sitemap.xml after making SEO changes - with CDN URLs - Image SEO issue resolved

That’s it. Now in sitemap and on your blog – you have image loading from CDN URLs 🙂 No content duplication issue. Would like to mention my friend Brian at KeyCDN whose article I saw first and inspired me to make above changes.

Please wait now for a week or so and you should see your images will be getting indexed by Google again as you see in the 1st image on the top of this page. If you have any better suggestion then let us know.

Update: Finally after 2 weeks, it seems almost all images are indexed again.

Finally after 2 weeks, it seems almost all images are indexed again - Crunchify Tips

Just FYI 🙂

cdn.crunchify.com and crunchify.com both loads same page. As CDN link has canonical HTML Tag setup correctly there isn’t any duplication you should see in Google Search Result Page.

CDN Doesn't create duplication issue if setup properly

If you liked this article, then please share it on social media. Have a question or suggestion? Please leave a comment to start the discussion.

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Reader Interactions

  48 Comments...

  1. Fabian says

    thanks for the tutorial. Very useful.

    What about feed rss? It keeps me giving images via www. and not cdn, causing a problem on google news search.

  2. Reginia Piontkowski says

    The https://crunchify.com website is one of the best we
    have found, and the How to fix Image Index SEO Issue for MaxCDN
    and WordPress in Google Search Console article is very well
    written and useful!
    Thanks! 🙂

  3. Murat says

    Hello thanks for article. This article only contains fixes for photo / image addresses.

    Did you check these? https://crunchify.com/maxcdn-and-wordpress-image-index-seo-issue-in-google-search-console-fix-cdn-image-links-and-avoid-duplicate-content-penalty/ and https://crunchify.com/contact/ ie website url s should not be opened from cdn.
    It must be routed with a 301 routing code.

    Hundreds of sites have been mentioned about adding canonical tag to image addresses and avoiding copy content in photos.

    However, the important thing is that the site URLs like my example should not work on cdn or should be redirected when called.

    In my opinion this is the main copy content that dear friends and executives do not ignore this issue. So how do we fix it?

    NOTE: I did something like this but it didn’t work.

    Regards. Murat Esgin

    • App Shah says

      Thanks Murat Esgin for detailed comment. The main purpose of CDN URL is to speed up image and other resource downloading from different regional POPs (Access points).

      As you see in the URL you posted, I’ve added meta tag canonical which tells google that, hey my original URL is without CDN and there isn’t any google penalty.
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a6ee49bd0d65f7dcfb2872d15663f60dbc8b89771c2382c68fe01b93eb0e358a.png

      If you redirect CDN URL’s to main content then there is no point of having it, isn’t it?

      I hope this clarifies. But let me know if I mis-understood your question.

      • Murat says

        Sorry for answering late. yes I use the canonical tag on my website too. is it enough? anyway thank you, have a nice day

        • App Shah says

          It should be enough. Make sure you use plugin to apply appropriate canonical across your site.

          Also, please double check there is no bug with the same. Hope this help!

  4. PARDEEP GARG says

    my am trying to get index my web images but i am still unable to do can you please check is there anything i can do in coding currently i am using yoast plugin for seo of my wordpress blog. i have successfully created sitemaps for images and videos and submit into webmaster but still only 20 images indexed out of 1247. this is my blog link please check if there is any technical glitch https :// sqrrl. in

    • App Shah says

      Hi Pradeep – after making changes, please wait for few weeks to atleast a month. Make sure your Sitemap file has all image URL with CDN part of it.

  5. Jyoti Ray says

    Hi,
    Thanks for the article. I have applied all the steps and now the images are getting indexed.
    However, my posts are opening with CDN i.e. “cdn. domain. com”. I am using KeyCDN. How to fix that?

    • App Shah says

      Hi Jyoti Ray – your posts are opening cdn image which is right behaviour 🙂

  6. Work and Travel says

    I have uploaded many images on my website workandtravell but its still no indexed. Its been 2 weeks. But also in my personel website (blogger based) there are 20 images has been indexed. Shouldn’t wordpress (also using yoast) website indexed more and faster? Hope it will be fine soon. Maybe its because of not a unique photo? Could you hit me up wit it?

    • App Shah says

      Hi there – are you using CDN on your site? It is maxCDN or any other CDN with more than 1 subdomain?

  7. Daniele says

    I had the same issue, I hope I have it solved thanks to this article.
    My case is with local cdn, not a true cdn, but 3 subdomains (cdn1, cdn2 and cdn3) on the same server, just to load resources in parallel.
    My solution was to implement the canonical header directly in .htaccess for images and pdf, though they were about 200: I had to set the canonical tag for each image, one by one, by using the .htaccess “files” directive.
    To not have a heavy .htaccess I tried to redirect all imageg to a php script to add eventually the canonical tag, but the site was slower.
    So now, no loss in velocity and all images and pdf should have the proper canonical tag.
    One thing about this article I’d want to ask is about the sitemap: you changed links from yourdomain to cdn.yourdomain: is this really necessary? I think that since images are loaded through yourdomain too, and they all have the canonical tags, google should be smart enough to index them all as yourdomain, without duplication issues.
    What do you think?
    Thank you for your article, it helped me a lot.

    • App Shah says

      Hi Daniele. I’m glad solution worked for you.

      I was also on the same boat 5 years ago with 3 different CDN subdomains. That was absolutely not required. With HTTP/2 now a days all requests are loading in parallel.

      Theoretically you are right that Google should understand this automatically and shouldn’t cause this issue but unfortunately that’s not the case.

      Happy blogging and keep visiting.

    • App Shah says

      Hi Javid – if you remove CDN and not using any CDN plugins then you won’t this issue in 1st place.

  9. hightechdad says

    Great article and very helpful! I too have a similar environment (MaxCDN, CloudFlare, etc.) and ran into the same issue of Google not showing any of my images (21k images submitted via sitemaps but only 45 images indexed…it’s dropped off recently).

    I’m trying to figure out what exactly happened. One thing that I have different than your setup is that I’m using the shared SSL from MaxCDN as I want to be sure that I don’t have mixed content warnings. However, I notice that in your article, you list everything as httpS including your MaxCDN subdomain.

    When I switched to the shared SSL, it obviously has a completely different TLD now, and not of my site. I made the functions.php change for Yoast to have that different TLD and I’m thinking that may have caused issues. Since I can’t “claim” that shared SSL domain, I can’t add it to Google Webmaster.

    So my question, if I were to change back to just the subdomain (e.g., CDN.mysite.com) and I don’t have an SSL cert installed on MaxCDN, would I still have the mixed content warnings? Or would it be HTTPS for my CDN items (the way yours shows).

    Thanks for your help!

    Michael

    • shubhanshu says

      I have exactly the same problem ” So my question, if I were to change back to just the subdomain (e.g., CDN. mysite. com) and I don’t have an SSL cert installed on MaxCDN, would I still have the mixed content warnings? Or would it be HTTPS for my CDN items (the way yours shows) “

      • App Shah says

        Hi shubhanshu. As mentioned above try installing SSL Cert at MaxCDN side on your subdomain cdn.site.com.

    • App Shah says

      Hi there – thanks for detailed information. Very informative and to the point.

      If you want to just use cdn.site.com domain then I would suggest you to install SSL Cert on your subdomain too.

      That’s what I did too. Got it $9.00 cert from NameCheap and installed at MaxCDN side. Once you do that, there wont be any mixed content warning. I hope this helps.

  10. Jonathan Hamilton says

    Hi App

    Fantastic article – thank you for taking the time to create. There are a couple of things that I would suggest would help if you are thinking of updating it:

    1. When you create your CName at your DNS provider, you need to add an identical “custom domain” at MaxCDN.
    2. If you want the www. and non www version of your site indexed, you will need to do this for both, that will mean adding 1 more line of code in the functions.php file to include the www version and also contacting MaxCDN through their chat to get them to allow you to add a www version of your site as a custom domain. And of course you will need to add the www version to google search console as well.
    3. If you use Cloudflare, the DNS settings there override your domain provider, so you need to make your CName changes there.

    Hope that helps someone 🙂

    Thanks again for the article!

    Jonathan

    • Peter says

      Hi Jonathan, can you please help regarding point 3? I noticed in search console images are not indexed by Google. I’m using Cloudflare and WordPress. The problem is Cloudflare doesn’t allow to set a custom domain to serve content from.

      • App Shah says

        Hi Peter – let’s wait for Jonathan’s update as I don’t have hands-on experience with Cloudflare.

      • Jonathan Hamilton says

        Hi Peter

        Sorry for the slow reply.

        You need to set up the Max CDN zone as an alias under Cloudflare in the DNS settings. I did this for www and non www but having reflected on this above, I will be redirecting www to non www and therefore you only need 1 alias in Cloudflare..

        Does that help?

        Many thanks,

        Jonathan

    • App Shah says

      Thanks Jonathan for details. Appreciate all detailed insight.

      Regarding point 2 – practically do you think folks are still using www. and non www version for the same sight? I would highly suggest to redirect domain to only 1.

      Here at crunchify, we are redirecting https://www.crunchify.com to https://crunchify.com. Good for SEO too.

      • Jonathan Hamilton says

        Hi App

        Thank you – that’s a good point! I wish that I had researched in more depth before diving in to the execution. Will follow this philosophy.

        Do you also recommend redirecting the non-secure to the secure. I.e. http:// pinkpiggy. biz to https ://pinkpiggy. biz and http ://www. pinkpiggy. biz to https ://www.pinkpiggy. biz or would redirect both to https ://pinkpiggy. biz to minimise on redirects?

        Many thanks,

        Jonathan

        • App Shah says

          Hi Johnathan – I would suggest every combination should redirect to https ://pinkpiggy. biz

          • Jonathan Hamilton says

            Hi App

            Further to my comment above, I have spent some time digging into this today.

            You are quite right – I have now set all http and www versions of my site to redirect to the https:// version.

            This simplifies the MaxCDN (now Stackpath) setup quite a bit.

            However…

            I checked my CDN implementation on my site and found that there had always been an error in it. Long story short, I changed cache plugins to WP-Rocket cache. It is paid, but so worth it. I then found that because my site is SSL, there are only 2 ways that a CDN can be implemented:

            1. But an SSL certificate (expensive) & configure within Max CDN
            2. Use the shared SSL certificate option within Max CDN but to do that, you need to use the custom SSL link that they give you, not your CName.

            For most users, considering that Google will expect you to be SSL enabled and that the SSL certificates are expensive, I think this means that CNames are out of the question.

            I therefore modified your custom functions.php code to change “https://carpfishinghq . com” to “https://carpfishinghq1-pinkpiggybiz. netdna-ssl. com”

            This appears to have worked perfectly. Thank you again for the inspiration.

            Incidentally you mentioned that you don’t have Cloudflare experience. I got all of my setup knowledge from this site which is pretty comprehensive (no affiliation): https: //onlinemediamasters. com/wp-rocket-settings/

            Hope that helps someone.

            Many thanks,
            Jonathan

  11. Hayden James says

    Great article! I’ve followed along. I notice I can still access cdn DOT crunchify DOT com from browser. Also if I add cdn. to the address bar above it take me to this article.

    Do you have any issues with duplicate content? Can be crawled also.

    And advise, since I’ve setup my CDN just as described above as well.

    Thanks again for taking the time to provide this insight!

  12. Ashikur Rahman Ratul says

    Thanks .. Really worked by your tips

    Thanks again
    Ratul
    System Admin

  13. Imran Nazir says

    I am Using ALL in one SEO Pack. can any one tell me solution with this plugin.

    Thanks

    • App Shah says

      Hi Hepsu – I’m glad it worked for you now.

      Between regarding your above point about featured image – I disagree. Just verified and seems crunchify_maxcdn_image_seo_fix() is applying URL changes to all images in addition to featured image. Here is a screenshot.

      Could you please share your sitemap URL?

  16. Ankur Jain says

    While technically it is working for you, it looks counter-intuitive to index the images at CDN subdomain. Here is why –

    1. You have set HTTP response header to canonical to your origin domain. This is a contradiction. Basically you are suggesting Google to take the ones at origin as original image and then suggesting from sitemap to index duplicate image.

    2. Tomorrow, if you wish to stop using cdn, Google will again de-index and have to reindex images on your origin.

    IMHO, this may be a workaround but not an ideal solution.

    By the way, if GWT shows as image not indexed it does not necessarily mean they are not in the actual Google index. I have seen this happening all the time.

    • App Shah says

      Thanks Ankur for details. Yeah 100% agree, technically this is working workaround solution for blogger, that all MaxCDN or other CDN users should apply.

      Ideally Google should honor rel=”canonical” URL and shouldn’t consider those images as duplicate entries. But somehow that part is broken and we end up using this workaround.

      Your point 2 is totally valid. If we stop using CDN then cycle starts again.

  17. Natali says

    Hi again! And another one SEO issue (or not issue) with MaxCDN. It’s about switching ON rel=canonical headers on CDN side and allowing of indexing images on it. I didn’t find any info about this and MaxCDN didn’t provided clear explanation when I’d asked them about. So when we’re switching ON rel=canonical headers on CDN side and allow Google to index images on CDN by providing urls to CDN.crunchify.com/*.jpg in the Yoast sitemaps, does this situation makes any impact on your image SEO for Google? I mean that Google indexes images on your CDN side but the headers of these images point to origin WWW. crunchify.com/*.jpg images as canonical ones.

    • App Shah says

      Good point Natali. I would like to answer your question based on my personal experience.

      1. It seems google in not honoring rel=”canonical” attribute at all.
      ==> Why? I have enabled it almost couple of years ago and as you see in image – all of my images dropped from google index even with rel=”canonical”

      2. So, i’m guessing – in current time it doesn’t even matter if we enable rel=”canonical” or not. But in order to prevent more changes at the same time I’ve kept that setting ON with all above changes. As solution worked perfectly – I guess, i’m going to keep that setting ON any ways.

      Hope this explanation helps.

  18. Natali says

    Hi App, are you sure that you don’t need to enable robots.txt on CDN side? Currently Google crawlers see the same file as on the Origin side – https://crunchify.com/robots.txt. I saw recommendations that one should allow indexing exlusively of images in robots.txt on CDN side, but don’t known if this wrong What do you think?

    • App Shah says

      Hi Natali –
      I’m sure and double confirmed, you don’t need to enable robots.txt at CDN side. Let me know if you face any issue while setup.

      I’ve just added new screenshot at the bottom of the post with new stats. Seems almost all images are indexed now 🙂

      • Natali says

        Hi App, thank you for replying!!!! But why I’ve asked about is that MaxCDN recommends to activate robots.txt on CDN side and to block indexing of everything but images. See at https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/manage-seo-with-cdn/ So in my opinion it’s still unclear what is better for SEO:

        (i) to forget about robots.txt on CDN side and show for crawlers same file as on origin side as https://crunchify.comrobots.txt, or

        (ii) to activate it and allow indexing of images only. Or both methods are correct 🙂

        • App Shah says

          I believe, I don’t agree with MaxCDN article mentioned above. In order to avoid further confusion for readers – I would say – point-1 you mentioned is sufficient (in fact – it worked :)).