Deindexed from Google images Sep17th
-
We have a travel website that has been ranked in Google for 12-14years. The site produces original images with branding on them and have been for years ranking well. There's been no site changes. We have a Moz spamscore 1/17 and Domain Authority 59.
Sep 17th all our images just disappeared from Google Image Search. Even searching for our domain with keyword photo results in nothing. I've checked our Search console and no email from Google and I see no postings on Moz and others relating to search algo changes with Images. I'm at a loss here.. does anyone have some advice?
-
Thanks for posting your follow up. We're still waiting to see restoration of our images and it's been 13 days.
-
As a final follow up. We removed the script that redirected people from going directly to our photos from image search. Requested that the manual action be removed, and the day that they removed it ALL RANKINGS WERE RESTORED!
While while this doesn't resolve the fact that big G allows users to take advantage of our service without visiting our website, it is a huge relief to know we aren't starting from the ground up.
-
Yup,
That was the ticket Dan. Webmaster reports the same manual action for my site.
It seems like a bit of a crack down on those that tried to avoid having users go straight to the photos hosted on a website.
This is a difficult situation for me, not just for loosing countless number 1 image positions for great keywords, but because the point of my site is to offer free stock photos. If users can search for them and hit the full resolution without visiting my website, then its just a drain on bandwidth.I have taken out the script that causes the URL rewrite, but considering Google image search brings 70% of my traffic, what would you guys suggest?
-
Good luck with your recovery!
-
Hey Dan,
Glad I read to the end as I was about to suggest looking at this. A client of mine was also hit very recently with something similar and it was rogue code that was carried over from one version to another.
Glad all is sorted
-Andy
-
We were just advised of a manual action from using an anti-hotlinking tool. This is old code from years ago so they must be just implementing this guideline now.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?ctx=MAC
-
It may not just be you. I just noticed the same thing happened to my website on 9/7.
Google webmaster reported an average of 2500 clicks per day from image search for the last year, then on the 7th 0, and not a click since then.
I just now noticed because I do not check analytics very often. I have a question though, when Google changed image search they made it easier for a customer to click directly to the photo without loading the website or getting an impression. To circumvent this some websites would change htaccess to detect this, and overlay the graphic, or cause the direct link to redirect to the page with the photo on it. I had one of these redirects, and now I cannot find anyone on Google Image search with that overlay or redirect. You can tell when a site had it implemented because the original small resolution wouldn't enhance, it would stay pixilated, I assume because Google couldn't access it directly.
I will keep investigating. Thoughts?
For more information. Webmaster doesn't report any change in page index, or any other warnings. The script mentioned is a rewrite rule in htaccess that changes the url to point to the source page rather than the direct photo
-
Bummer. This smells of a technical change that occurred on your site.
Check: robots.txt - are you blocking access to images? You can also look in Search Console and under Crawl use the Robots.txt tester and see if your image URLs fail there. It will show you where the issue is.
Check things like all your images got moved to a CDN and no 301 redirects from the old image URLs were put in place.
Talk to your dev and look at every ticket prior to Sept 17th and see if there is anything else that was changed.
The good news is that if this is something technical and you fix it quickly, you should recover.
Good luck!
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
-
Google Drop Following Negative Article in New York Times
I have two sites that were mentioned in a negative article in The New York Times a couple weeks ago. They saw a good increase in traffic, but on the sixth both of them saw sudden unexplained Google drops. Both seemed on the average position from search console doubling overnight. I run similar websites that have seen no such drops. The only thing these two have in common are being mentioned in the same negative article. Normally I would expect the mention from a major news outlet to make the sites more authoritative in Google's eyes. Is this a coincidence or a possible manual penalty? They still rank number one for their respected brand names, but everything else has suffered. Did Google make any recent algorithm changes or do you think someone at Google may have read the article and decided the sites needed to be demoted?
Algorithm Updates | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Anyone experience google penalties for full-screen pop-ups?
Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold: Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update? and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups? We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while. Let's hear what the community has to say 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | VERBInteractive1 -
Any suggestions why I would rank 1 on google and be on 3rd page for bing/yahoo?
Currently the site I'm working on ranks very well on google rankings but then when we cross reference into yahoo and bing we are basically in the graveyard of keywords. (bottom of 3rd page). Why would that be? Any suggestions or things I can do to fix this or troubleshoot it? Here are some things I can think of that might affect this but not sure. 1. our sitemap hasn't been updated in months and URL changes have been made 2. Onsite for yahoo and bing is different from google? 3. Bing is just terrible in general? 4. Inbound links? This one doesn't make sense though unless the search engines rank links in different ways. All jokes aside I would really appreciate any help as currently the few top ranked keywords we have are about 30% of our organic traffic and would have a huge affect on the company if we were able to rank as we should across all platforms. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | JemJemCertified0 -
Pages fluctuating +/- 70 positions in Google SERPs?
I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?
Algorithm Updates | | sbrault740 -
Google keyword tool
I was quite happy with google keyword tool for basic and accurate searches for keywords. Can anyone suggests a new tool that will give accurate search volume on google ( country specific ) I am not interest in info for adwords, and find a keyword planner tool way out in traffic results, compared to Keyword tool. Is the keyword tool completely gone?
Algorithm Updates | | summer3000 -
Google is forcing a 301 by truncating our URLs
Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
Algorithm Updates | | mmac
http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful. We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs. These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week. I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week. Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
Michael0 -
Google site links on sub pages
Hi all Had a look for info on this one but couldn't find much. I know these days that if you have a decent domain good will often automatically put site links on for your home if someone searches for your company name, however has anyone seen these links appear for sub pages? For example, lets say I had a .com domain with /en /fr /de sub folders, each seoed for their location. If I were to then have domain.com/en/ as no1 in Google for my company in the UK would I be able to get site links under this or does it only work on the 'proper' homepage domain.com/ A client of mine wants to reorganise their website so they have different location sections ranking in different markets but they also want to keep having sitewide links as they like the look of it Thanks Carl
Algorithm Updates | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Regarding google panda: would it be wise to use automatic generated content when there is no content.
Hi guys, i am currently creating a local business directory and was deciding when we first start there will be a lot of business listings without a business decription until the owner of that business come to submit a description. so when if a business listing have no business description would it be better to have an automatic generated business description like this:
Algorithm Updates | | usaccess608
www.startlocal.com.au/retail/books/tas_hobartandsouth/Scene_Magazine_2797040.html the automated genrated description for this listing on that page is:
Scene Magazine is a business that is based in Kingston, 7050, TAS: Hobart And South. Scene Magazine is listed in 2 categories including: Magazines and Periodicals Shops and Book Stores and Shops. Within the Magazines and Periodicals Shops category there are 5 businesses within 25 km of Scene Magazine. Some of those businesses included within the radius of 25 km are Island Magazine, Artemis Publishing Consultants and Bride Tasmania Magazine. would google panda affect this or not and would it be wise to use this auto content when there is no description for a business?0
