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.
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
-
How long does google takes to crawl a single site ?
lately i have been thinking , when a crawler visits an already visited site or indexed site, whats the duration of its scanning?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Best and easiest Google Depersonalization method
Hello, Moz hasn't written anything about depersonalization for years. This article has methods, but I don't know if they are valid anymore. What's an easy, effective way to depersonalize Google search these days? I would just log out of Google, but that shows different ranking results than Moz's rank tracker for one of our main keywords, so I don't know if that method is correct. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0 -
Celebrity Profile On The Side of Google For High Profile Person
Hello! When I google "Justin Timberlake" I see web search results and a sidebar. See image below: http://screencast.com/t/qwYeiFZQRzT How does one get their results to display like this? Is this something that Google creates automatically or is it something the celebrity initiates/creates on their behalf. Does the celebrity have any options to choose from as to what displays on this sidebar? What is this called? I look forward to your response. qwYeiFZQRzT
Algorithm Updates | | InternetRep0 -
Google Index
Hi all, I just submit my url and linked pages along with xml map to index. How long does it take google to index my new pages?
Algorithm Updates | | businessowner0 -
My Website No Longer Appears in Mobile Google Search but Does in Desktop...Why Is This?
For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW0 -
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 -
Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
Hi girls + guys, a site of us were hit by a google update or a google penalty. We have lost 50% google traffic in one day (25th april, 2012). (Total visitors in average per day: 6k, yesterday: 3k) It's a german website, so I think google.de (germany) was updated. Our rankings in google.at (austria) are also affected, but it's not that bad as in google.de. We have not done any specific on page seo activities in the last two months. GWT doesn't have any message for us (no critical errors). After my first analyse I can say this: google has indexed 17k pages (thats fine) we are on 1st place with our domain name the last three days, the google traffic went up (+20%), but yesterday it was 50% below average (so -70%) last week we had a very good day, we had twice the traffic than normal, but this calmed down the following days we have lost number no. 1 places at two high traffic keywords. We had these no 1 rankings for years. We have been outranked by two of our competitors, but they have not done any onpage changes. We have lost a lot of positions at a lot of keywords. But there are also keywords which moved up. We have good content, useres are visiting 5 pages in average. No virus, no hacker (no hidden cloaking page) it's an old domain (2002) Lot of (good) inbound links Lot's of likes, g+. Good twitter activty. So, all in all I think it's more likely a ranking algo change than a penalty (a penalty for what reason?) My specific question(s): Is there any "check list" which could help me to find out the reason for this mess? What is the best strategy to regain the positions? New HTML code? New On page seo? (seomoz grades most of our important pages an A) Any idea would be appreciated! Best wishes,
Algorithm Updates | | GeorgFranz
Georg.1
