Images no longer on Symzio [resolved]

Hey Steve,

As I was explaining to Henri (who recently joined Symzio), the system has been organized to carry millions of images. Accordingly, it has a large number of processes that systematically work in the background to maintain the integrity of the search – most importantly, to ensure that if a contributor’s images are no longer available, the site does not serve those results.

At the same time, it also spiders contributor sites quite quickly to add fresh content very fast.

One of the processes that works in the background is a ‘quick-ping’ system: it very quickly pings contributor sites to ensure it is online. This is a shallow screen to quickly disable sites that may be offline, if even temporarily. It does not react to the ping on the first go – but if the site is down for more than one consecutive ping, it disables all media from that site.

Once the site is back up, the system naturally re-enables all the media.

Important things to note:

1) This whole process does NOT affect your media URLs, or their position in the search results.

2) Changing any meta data on your images, including titles, descriptions or tags, will NOT result in them being removed from the search results.

My guess is, while you were updating, or as you uploaded some code, your site was temporarily inaccessible for a few minutes. It was bad timing that the quick pings checked your site in that time. However, nothing huge is lost as your images will all be back soon – over half are back already.

The reason it is so strict and abrupt is that unlike agencies, everything, and I mean everything, depends on contributor sites being online. On contributor sites the widget will show broken images, on search results we’ll get broken images – even customer purchases won’t be able to finish because we don’t store your original and extract that in real time when generating orders.

It’s one of those necessary things that makes us different from agencies, and puts increased responsibility on the contributor. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though – we’ll tweak these things as time progresses to make the process smarter if possible.

Finally, for SEO purposes, Google does not care if content goes down temporarily. It won’t harm the ranking of your images in Google unless your site goes down quite often.

Yes – I already increased it to three, meaning it would have to be inaccessible for three straight minutes. There are a lot of options we have to minimize the downtime and I’ll look into these things systematically. I wouldn’t worry much about it for now.

I think what we may do is implement a secondary process that basically immediately re-enables your files as soon as your site comes back up. Right now it waits to re-spider them.

Edit: That process has been added – so now, even if your site goes down for an hour, your images will only be offline for an hour. As soon as your site comes back, they will come back too.

Edit: Actually, they will immediately be re-enabled, but they still will need to be re-indexed by the search engine. That means direct links to them will work fine, but they won’t show up in the search results until indexing is performed again. This shouldn’t hurt your external links at all since the direct links will work fine.

Let me look into it.

Those are search pages I’m linking to btw – not the actual image page.

Issue fixed – was related to a fix I implemented a few days ago to add support for foreign characters. Thanks for pointing it out Steve – this is why I love a community driven project.