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.
How does Google view duplicate photo content?
-
Now that we can search by image on Google and see every site that is using the same photo, I assume that Google is going to use this as a signal for ranking as well. Is that already happening?
I ask because I have sold many photos over the years with first-use only rights, where I retain the copyright. So I have photos on my site that I own the copyright for that are on other sites (and were there first). I am not sure if I should make an effort to remove these photos from my site or if I can wait another couple years.
-
Hi Lina
What Google wants is unique markup and tagging for that image. It relies on things like image optimization (for SEO), Schema markup, and image sitemaps to assist in understanding the photo better and what it represents so it can be returned in search results.
You can learn more about reverse image search here.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Well, I'm not that good at it. Overall, it's not a big deal but some of the photos are from places that are far away and that I'm not likely to go back to soon. And now I need to go through the whole site and see which ones might be on other sites. In the future, I know to keep my best photos for my own use!
I just watched that white board video and realized that I have an awful lot to work on.
-
Lina
I would look at it glass half full. I cant take a photo - so it costs me or clients 1,000's if not 10,000 for photography. You clearly can - so cost effective and you can control what goes onto your site. You are in a great position. Upsell original photography...
I also think though it is a factor it is not high ranking factor (yet!).
I also found a great WBF for you. https://moz.com/blog/panda-optimization-whiteboard-friday - states the position better than me!
good luck, photography is a great talent to have.
-
It's a shame, because many of the photos were included with CNN articles, so they have been scraped and are on hundreds of sites. The photos all have my name on the photo itself as the copyright holder, but that isn't going to mean anything to Google when I used the same photo two years later. This sort of means that photographers won't be able to resell photos, and that stock photography is a terrible idea!
-
Yes, that is already happening.
Most assume that even though "google reverse image" is "public" behind the scenes it forms part of the google algorithm. Google wants originality... and it seems only natural to use google reverse image as an indicator.
If it is one photo on a few sites i would not get too excited, but if it is on alot of sites and is not difficult to change - I would suggest you do.
test your image on google reverse image... always a good start.
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | Jun 9, 2022, 2:29 PM | rj_dale0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | Jul 10, 2017, 12:31 PM | znotes0 -
How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?
We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg
Technical SEO | Aug 2, 2016, 12:32 PM | jasny0 -
Duplicate Content on a Page Due to Responsive Version
What are the implications if a web designer codes the content of the site twice into the page in order to make the site responsive? I can't add the url I'm afraid but the H1 and the content appear twice in the code in order to produce both a responsive version and a desktop version. This is a Wordpress site. Is Google clever enough to distinguish between the 2 versions and treat them individually? Or will Google really think that the content has been repeated on the same page?
Technical SEO | Apr 14, 2016, 9:35 AM | Wagada0 -
Google and responsive content in display:none CSS
I’m building a WordPress site with Visual Composer and I’ve hit a point where I need to show a totally different section on a mobile compared to a desktop/tablet. My issue/question comes from the fact that both mobile and desktop rows will have the same content as well as H1/H2/H3 tags. From inspecting the elements I see the mobile only rows are hidden until the page size shrinks through being set to 'display: none' in the CSS (standard visual composer way of handling width & responsiveness) How will Google see this in terms of SEO? I don’t want to come across as if I’m cloaking text and H1 tags on the page (I have emailed the visual composer support but wanted to get an external opinion)
Technical SEO | Apr 11, 2015, 1:43 PM | shloy23-2945840 -
How to prevent duplicate content at a calendar page
Hi, I've a calender page which changes every day. The main url is
Technical SEO | Sep 10, 2012, 2:21 PM | GeorgFranz
/calendar For every day, there is another url: /calendar/2012/09/12
/calendar/2012/09/13
/calendar/2012/09/14 So, if the 13th september arrives, the content of the page
/calendar/2012/09/13
will be shown at
/calendar So, it's duplicate content. What to do in this situation? a) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 301? (but the redirect changes the day after to /calendar/2012/09/14) b) Redirect from /calendar to /calendar/2012/09/13 with 302 (but I will loose the link juice of /calendar?) c) Add a canonical tag at /calendar (which leads to /calendar/2012/09/13) - but I will loose the power of /calendar (?) - and it will change every day... Any ideas or other suggestions? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
Duplicate content and http and https
Within my Moz crawl report, I have a ton of duplicate content caused by identical pages due to identical pages of http and https URL's. For example: http://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations https://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations The strange thing is that 99% of these URL's are not sensitive in nature and do not require any security features. No credit card information, booking, or carts. The web developer cannot explain where these extra URL's came from or provide any further information. Advice or suggestions are welcome! How do I solve this issue? THANKS MOZZERS
Technical SEO | May 28, 2018, 11:47 PM | hawkvt10 -
Whats with the backslash in the url adding as duplicate content?
Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?
Technical SEO | Feb 20, 2012, 3:18 PM | Boogily0