Problems with the image: image tag in site maps. Bypass misunderstanding Yandex validator

Sitemap is an important tool in setting up sites that no advertiser or webmaster will ever risk neglecting. Naturally, even very insignificant and small remarks from search engines should not only be corrected promptly, but also should not appear in principle. In this article, a popular error with the image: image tag and its solutions will be analyzed.

About the problem

Most novice webmasters and advanced users use a special for every possible sitemap and plugins to generate a sitemap. We agree, it is convenient and fast, but the algorithms of such software can never replace a live webmaster, therefore, bugs, inaccuracies and simple errors that can “spoil” the indexation and promotion of a resource often occur. Speaking about the leaders of SEO plug-ins for WordPress (Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack), the situation is exactly the same - when using the built-in “perturbation” card generators of the Yandex validator (and sometimes Google), are inevitable.

The most common mistake that our clients encountered (many of them come from other agencies and from freelancers) is the failure of the Yandex Yandex Map Tag for images, namely the warning about the image: image. On the one hand, the great and mighty Plato Schukin assures that if the tag is not used by Yandex, it is simply skipped. On the other hand, it is not clear why, then, a warning is issued, and why not all users with similar tagging of cards appear. Moreover, the network is full of tearful stories of users and even beginner webmasters who attribute everything they can to this error - from pessimization in search to complete departure from it.
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Solutions and Prevention

Naturally, such stories are no more than incorrect conclusions of beginners, but there is a problem and it needs to be solved.

The tag itself is created to refer to images. Google perfectly perceives it, but Yandex through time - many cards with this text do not cause questions in the validator, some receive a warning about an unknown tag. There are several solutions to the problem:

• Remove images from sitemap.xml. To do this, you must write the card manually (which is long, inconvenient, but old school). The settings of the above-mentioned plugins will not give any special result - all the information on the image will simply move to the submap (in any case, this is the situation at the end of 2016).
  
  
• The most optimal and cost-effective way to solve the problem is to deactivate the autogeneration of maps in the plugins that you use (Yoast SEO, All In One SEO Pack, and others). To generate the "correct" map, use the "correct" plug-ins and add-ins that are focused on the Russian segment, for example Google XML Sitemaps. It is not strange, but the plugin for Google is ideally suited for the Yandex validator.

Instead of the total

Whether Plato fixes this problem is unknown. For the time being, it is advisable to discard information from the images in your map at all if they are not the main content on the site. It's no secret that bots and without maps do an excellent job with indexing graphics.

If this information is in priority, then use the recommended Google plugin. Its setting will not cause problems even in a child.