Photon and Increased Rejections in Google Merchant Center

  • Hi – since turning on Photon for one site we’ve had about 21% of our previously-approved products become “Disapproved” in Google Merchant Center. Google is scant on details but where the image usually shows up we are getting a message “There was an error accessing the image.”

    I had a look to see what Google documentation says and there are a couple of guidelines but the only one I think could apply are the ones regarding the time it’s taking the site (or CDN in this case) to respond to image requests by the google bot.

    Have you heard of this kind of issue before? Any way to check Photon logs to see whether it is keeping up with requests from Google?

    Google does try to spider images again after a few days but it has been several weeks and none of the Disapproved items have returned to Approved status so I’m getting a little concerned.

    There’s also a chance that it’s related to my theme which has Lazy Load enabled, though my understanding is that Google is impervious to things like this.

    Would appreciate any insight you could offer – thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter jlev00

    (@jlev00)

    Update: I disabled Photon and Disapproved products have gone back to their previous level.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    That’s the first time I hear about this.

    where the image usually shows up we are getting a message “There was an error accessing the image.”

    That seems to be the problem here. Photon itself will have no problems keeping up with requests from Google. However, if the original image (the one you uploaded to your site) is large and takes time to load, Photon may not be able to cache it right away. As mentioned in the support documentation, if Photon can’t get your image in less than 10 seconds it will give up.

    If Photon can’t cache the image, it can’t display it to your readers and to Google. It could be what’s happening here.

    Could you try to upload smaller images, make sure they’re all displayed properly on your site, and then see if it helps?

    Let me know how it goes!

    Thread Starter jlev00

    (@jlev00)

    Hi Jeremy – thanks for the response.

    The original images were 1020×1020 which is large but not excessive. My web host may have throttled Photon. In fact, I could see about 20% of images were not cached by Photon on the first pass, an issue which improved over time but never completely resolved itself. Also worth noting is that this 20% wasn’t the same products as the 21% increase in Merchant Center feed disapproved products.

    Unfortunately it’s going to be hard to test with smaller images because 1) the site is a production site, and 2) we don’t have an easy way to update the filenames in order to force a cache purge.

    Let me have a think how I’m going to move forward on this.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    If your host throttles Photon, smaller images may not help, and it might consequently be best to deactivate the module and let them know that it’s okay to let all requests with the Photon/1.0 User Agent through.

    Once the throttle is gone, your problems may go away if your images load in less than 10 seconds.

    I hope this helps.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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