Google Webmaster Central Blog - Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

Google now indexes SVG

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 11:30 PM

Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.

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29 comments:

emil said...

This is really great news, you guys index/crawl almost "anything".

Good Job,
Emil Uzelac

David Leunen said...

Still not following links inside SVG.
See http://svg.nicubunu.ro/

Come on guys !

tonda said...

But on what is the based on? On file name or description tag in the svg?

azer said...

Have you guys tried it using XSLT? Because I'm sure about that Google doesn't index XSLT pages. My homepage was made up of an RSS formatted XML document referring an XSL file, and now it's totally invisible in Google search.

tonda said...

first you have to get xhtml or html from xslt transformation. I mean google cannot do this transformation

KB said...

Great!
I hope Google Image Search in the future include vector graphics like SVG with previews. And perhaps other vector formats like EPS, AI, DWG, DXF, SKP and vector fonts?

Now you can only search for raster graphics (bitmap formats).

nicu said...

I have my experimental SVG website up for a couple of years (David Leunen) watching for crawlers and hoping the search engine to start supporting SVG.

As the logs show, the Google crawler so not follow the hyperlinks inside the SVG document, so from an entire (mini)site, only the first page is indexed. This is more than nothing but still not good enough, hope to see some more improvements.

Afzal Khan said...

The web is getting bigger and bigger...it's a great news to get SVG files indexed at Google SERP's, I hope it doesn't brings up new issues related to SEO.

prkos said...

Any news on SVG in image searches?

Floyd-ATC said...

The question still is... when will Microsoft catch up and support SVG? 2011? 2012?

ydfeed said...

Why not use the “X-Robots-Tag: yesindex” directive in the HTTP header to allow indexing instead?

india143.org said...

One more achievement by Google as expected by everyone.

edith hadiansyah said...

great.. nice invent. :)

BossVza said...

"Thank You"

Good job.....

leeand00 said...

Good idea, but isn't this a little...late?

SVG has been around for like 10 years!

Nice work on finally indexing it, but why couldn't you have gotten this to us sooner?

Mike said...

Thank you. This is great news. Do you plan to follow links inside the SVG?

"Luke" D. said...

it is X-Robots-Tag: index
not X-Robots-Tag: yesindex

Bala said...

Wow that is a great news for us ! This would add a whole lot possibilities for web-designers.

Srinivas Tamada said...

Good news

Al said...

Had some problems, but know it´s working

Anton said...

thansk info..

Web said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Web said...

Why <canvas>, HTML5/WHATWG? The bitmappyness, the redrawing, the inaccessibility? How does that become part of the standard, and not SVG?

Divakar said...

Thanks Googlers for such a great work.

Zebra said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Zebra said...

No really SEO impact that I can imagine. As the Webmaster World poster mentioned, SWFs are rarely seen in SERPs' top results so only very obscure long-tail phrases will rank.

Josefina Argüello / alta en Google

peepo said...

please index title and desc content.
They are designed to describe SVG images and their purpose, in addition to text.

And, please dont index CSS:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=honte.eu
#groupHits {cursor:pointer; } WebGo board grid // latestMove

Chris Silvey said...

What exactly gets indexed besides the name.svg

I haven't seen svg xlmn title and description.

No metadata elements RDF or dc: elements. Not even an "a" element that holds visible text.

What's the scoop?

Google Webmaster Central said...

Hi everyone,

Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.

Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team