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.
Do the search engines penalise you for images being WATERMARKED?
-
Our site contains a library of thousands of images which we are thinking of watermarking. Does anyone know if Google penalise sites for this or is it best practice in order to protect revenues?
As watermarking these images makes them less shareable (but protects revenues) i was thinking Google might then penalise us - which might affect traffic
Any ideas?
-
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/pros-and-cons-of-watermarked-images.html
"Will Google rank an image differently just because it's watermarked?
Peter: Nope. The presence of a watermark doesn't itself cause an image to be ranked higher or lower." -
Thanks Russ, v helpful
-
Nope, if they did, i'd be in big trouble.
-
I am fairly certain Google does not penalize sites for watermarking images. However, losing shares of those images could potentially lose rankings.
One opportunity would be to include a section of your images free of charge with a link attribution policy. This would get you a nice link (don't manipulate the alt text, just the name of the image or your service)
Also, have you checked to see how often your images are being stolen? You can use a service like tineye.com to do this.
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 image search filter tabs and how to rank on them
I have noticed Google image search has included suggestion tabs (e.g,. design, nature... when searching background) on the top of the image search.
Technical SEO | | Mike555
Are there specific meta tags I can add into my images so that my images will show up on each tab?
Do those filters just show content based on image keywords or something else? IRme7gQ0 -
Google Search Console Not Sending Messages
One of our sites received a Manual Penalty for unnatural links by Google. However, we never received a message in Google Search Console or an email about the manual action. The only reason we knew about the penalty is by the obvious drop in rankings, then signing into search console to look for any manual actions, which we found. Since then, we have submitted a disavow file and a reconsideration request. However, once again we did not receive an email or message in search console that shows confirmation of the disavow or that they received the reconsideration request. The disavow file does show up after I upload it, and it says it was successfully uploaded... but no messages or emails. After many hours of investigating the various canonical versions of our website on Search Console, we found out that there were several “owners” of the various canonical versions of our site that had “could not find the email address” as a site owner. We found out that these were previous employees who no longer worked with the company and their email address was deleted. After unverifying these site owners, (all the ones that had “could not find the email address” as the site owner), the notifications, emails and messages in Search Console started to appear. However, the only place they did not appear, is the main canonical version of our site. Of course, the main canonical version of our site (https://www) is the version that we uploaded the disavow and reconsideration request. This is the canonical version of the site that we need to receive these messages to know if our reconsideration request was granted! We’ve just reuploaded the disavow file and reconsideration request to all of the other canonical versions (2 of the 3 received the message about the penalty)…. and we are currently awaiting a response. Has anybody else had problems with not receiving notifications in search console due to deleted email addresses?
Technical SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
Should a sub domain be a separate property in the Search Console?
We're launching a blog on a sub-domain of a corp site (blog.corpsite.com). We already have corpsite.com set up in the Search Console. Should I set up a separate property for this sub-domain in the Search Console (WMT) in order to manage it? Is it necessary? Thanks, JM
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Best Practice on 301 Redirect - Images
We have two sites that sell the same products. We have decided to retire one of the sites as we'd like to focus on one property. I know best practice is to redirect apples to apples, which in our case is easily done since the sites sold the same thing. www.SiteABC.com/ProductA can be redirected to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA. My question is how far does that thinking go regarding images? Each product has a main product page, of course, and then up to 6 images in some cases. Is it necessary to redirect www.SiteABC.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg to www.SiteXYZ.com/ProductA-Image1.jpg? Or can they all be redirected to just the product page?
Technical SEO | | Natitude0 -
No Search Results Found - Should this return status code 404?
A question came up today on how to correctly serve the right status code on pages where no search results are found. I did a couple searches on some major eccomerce and news sites and they were ALL serving status code 200 for No Search Results Found http://www.zappos.com/dsfasdgasdgadsg http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sdafasdklgjasdklgjsjdjkl http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=dfjakljgdkslagklasd&_sacat=0 http://www.cnn.com/search/?query=sdgadgdsagas&x=0&y=0&primaryType=mixed&sortBy=date&intl=false http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sdagasdgasdgasg I thought I read somewhere were it was recommended to serve a status code 404 on these types of pages. Based on what I found above, all sites were serving a 200, so it appears this may not be the best practice. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0