you also need to remember that the search engines do not (and do not want to or have to) index every page and every image on every site. They index a representative sample based on what the search engines perceive to be internet user interest, coupled with the "quality" and "relevance" of the image or page.Quote:
Originally Posted by jodean
A tool like SitemapXML provides a list of URLs on your site so the search engine can reference that to check pages (and images) and see if there is content that the search engine believes is "quality" and "relevant" that it wants to index and list in search results. This tool is to help the search engines find content, but does not (and cannot) do anything to *guarantee* placement. In fact, the search engines often reiterate that there is NOT a way to *guarantee* placement in organic search. The process is automated to keep the system more fair.
The search engines are constantly updating, changing, and correcting the way they list results on their sites in order to better serve people searching (not site owners). Google admits that they make changes to their algorithms an average of twice a day.
All that said, having only 20 of 700 images indexed would indicate that Google is not finding these images relevant or beneficial to search users. In addition, if the number of images indexed has dramatically dropped recently, that would indicate that Google's system has found something in your site to bring your content into question. More important than the image search, I would look at how many pages on your site are indexed, and whether that has changed recently. If it has also dropped, you may want to look into what search engine optimization techniques you have used in the past, and whether any of those are considered "search engine spamming" or "key word stuffing" and maybe correct those issues to help your site.
None of this, however, is really relevant to SitemapXML, which only provides the search engines with the list of pages and images on your site so the search engines can check that they are seeing everything to better decide what to index and what not to index.
