Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will background images get indexed?
-
Will images, loaded via css class, get indexed?
For example something like :
style="background-image: url(https://www.mysite.be/content/dam/homepage-mama.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.web.2000.9999.jpeg);"
-
On my site there is a gallery made by images embedded as background images.
Google doesn't see them.
-
On a sidenote, if you want to prevent indexation of them you can probably add the URLs in to Robots.txt or disallow a specific folder for those images.
On the flipside, if you want to get them indexed, you can manually link to the images and submit an image sitemap to google with just those particular images. Doing both is better than just one.
-
Quick anecdotal reference - for the 1 site I just checked (which allows CSS to be crawled), no they are not indexed.
However, Google crawls CSS and can load those images when you Fetch And Render inside of GWT I believe, so theoretically they can index them.
Next question is what would cause them to do so (eg inbound links to that image file), but I don't have an answer for that.
-
Unfortunately, "can" and "will" are sometimes two different matters. Google is pretty CSS-savvy at this point, and I'm 98% sure they can index those images. If it's a background image, and depending on how it's set up, they may choose not to, but that's a bit trickier.
Weird question, but do you want it indexed, or not?
Asking around to see if there are any image-SEO experts who can provide a more data-driven answer.
-
Nancy,
Although I am saying this all based on my personal speculation I believe that they will be indexed. I do not know 100% if it will but Google has gotten much better at indexing Java/CSS. As far as if you want these to be indexed I would also take a look at Google's image guidelines for best practice and see if there is something of value in there.
-
Hi Nancy,
This article might be of some assistance - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25773047/what-will-be-indexed-better-in-search-engines-img-tags-or-background-images-wit
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does google index html5 tracks (captions) for videos?
If we add the <track> tag next to a html5 video, with a Web Video Text Tracks Format (WebVTT) file for video subtitles / captions will google visit that and index it?
Image & Video Optimization | | ismgadmin0 -
Is getting views to an infographic through Imgur beneficial to SEO?
I'm considering posting infographics to Imgur in addition to hosting them on my site in an effort to leverage Reddit a bit more this year. My concern is that, if all goes well, we'll get a ton of views through Reddit to Imgur, maybe a couple clickthroughs to the site, and links to (probably) the Imgur page. I don't see that Imgur gives your profile a followed link, so how would any of this help SEO. I assume it would, because respected guys like John Dougherty espouse the benefits of Reddit, but I can't see how and I need to justify the effort to my department head.
Image & Video Optimization | | MattHolden1 -
Moving Images to Subdomain: SEO Impacts
For sever work- load enhancements we are planning to move our images to a sub-domain. so the files would be located at something like images.domain.com Rather than domain.com/images/ We are a large Ecommerce site so we have a lot of images. These will be self hosted so we are not using a CDN. I'm hoping someone has done the same and if there were any steps they had wished they had taken before making the move/ if they noticed any traffic impacts things like that.
Image & Video Optimization | | RMATVMC0 -
Google images not showing on SERP
Hi, I recently noticed that after a specific name search, Google images on the 'Web' SERP are no longer showing up. About a month ago, there were atleast 4-5 headshots of this particular person showing up whenever his name was searched. Now no images are showing, just the ten organic links and two links from adwords campaign we have going. The images are still optimized and some are even from editorial sites. Does anyone know what may have caused the images to disappear and what we can do to bring them back to the main SERP? (Not sure if it matters but we are in Canada) Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Metadata stored in images read by search engines?
Does anyone know if metadata stored in images is read by search engines?My company stores images in digital asset management systems and metadata keyword tags are added to the images, so they can easily be found within the system. Since these keywords are stored in the image file, I was wondering if search engines can read them once the image is placed on the website, but I'm not finding any evidence of this in my research.
Image & Video Optimization | | unitedairlines0 -
Google maps displaying wrong image
Hi, I couldn't figure this out, how do i change image that shows up on the right side for maps results, do i change it in my Google places account ?(which i did and and its a first one) or in Google plus, i just cant get it? Thanks for help.
Image & Video Optimization | | Davidmez0 -
Video SEO - Why are my videos not being indexed?
Hello All, I work on a site that has a lot of videos. The trouble is none of them are ranking. Here is an example of a page with a video on. If you click the play button you will see But none of these videos are being indexed, as you can see here. Is it because these videos are just mp4 files, rather than being embedded players (like SEOmoz use for instance)? Would embedding videos through Viddler / Wistia / Youtube etc help? Or is there some other issue at work here? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rich
Image & Video Optimization | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Getting reviews to stick on Yelp & Google
Do you have any tricks to getting reviews to stick on yelp? Whenever we ask out customers to review us on there their reviews end up getting "detected" as fakes. I have tried it out myself, and the only way i've gotten them to stick is making several reviews of various different local businesses with average ratings and then dropping one in for the client with a better rating. Perhaps this is a little on the blackhat/greyhat side of things. But if our customers are legitimatly trying to review us and it doesn't stick, i don't feel all that bad taking this route, the only real problem is time consumed. What about google? has anyone had any luck gaining more reviews for their client on google?
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0
