Not all images indexed in Google
-
Hi all,
Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them.
For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well.
Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index.
Any ideas on this issue?
Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
-
Fetching, rendering, caching and indexing are all different. Sometimes they're all part of the same process, sometimes not. When Google 'indexes' images, that's primarily for its image search engine (Google Images). 'Indexing' something means that Google is listing that resource within its own search results for one reason or another. For the same reasons that Google rarely indexes all of your web-pages, Google also rarely indexes all of your images.
That doesn't mean that Google 'can't see' your images and has an imperfect view of your web-page. It simply means that Google does not believe the image which you have uploaded are 'worthy' enough to be served to an end-user who is performing a certain search on Google images. If you think that gaining normal web rankings is tricky, remember that most users only utilise Google images for certain (specific) reasons. Maybe they're trying to find a meme to add to their post on a form thread or as a comment on a Social network. Maybe they're looking for PNG icons to add into their PowerPoint presentations.
In general, images from the commercial web are... well, they're commercially driven (usually). When was the last time you expressedly set out to search for Ads to look at on Google images? Never? Ok then.
First Google will fetch a page or resource by visiting that page or resource's URL. If the resource or web-page is of moderate to high value, Google may then render the page or resource (Google doesn't always do this, but usually it's to get a good view of a page on the web which is important - yet which is heavily modified by something like JS or AJAX - and thus all the info isn't in the basic 'source code' / view-source).
Following this, Google may decide to cache the web-page or resource. Finally, if the page or resource is deemed worthy enough and Google's algorithm(s) decide that it could potentially satisfy a certain search query (or array thereof) - the resource or page may be indexed. All of this can occur in various patterns, e.g: indexing a resource without caching it or caching a resource without indexing it (there are many reasons for all of this which I won't get into now).
On the commercial web, many images are stock or boiler-plate visuals from suppliers. If Google already has the image you are supplying indexed at a higher resolution or at superior quality (factoring compression) and if your site is not a 'main contender' in terms of popularity and trust metrics, Google probably won't index that image on your site. Why would Google do so? It would just mean that when users performed an image search, they would see large panes of results which were all the same image. Users only have so much screen real-estate (especially with the advent of mobile browsing popularity). Seeing loads of the same picture at slightly different resolutions would just be annoying. People want to see a variety, a spread of things! **That being said **- your images are lush and I don't think they're stock rips!
If some images on your page, post or website are not indexed - it's not necessarily an 'issue' or 'error'.
Looking at the post you linked to: https://flothemes.com/best-lightroom-presets-photogs/
I can see that it sits on the "flothemes.com" domain. It has very strong link and trust metrics:
Ahrefs - Domain rating 83
Moz - Domain Authority - 62
As such, you'd think that most of these images would be unique (I don't have time to do a reverse image search on all of them) - also because the content seems really well done. I am pretty confident (though not certain) that quality and duplication are probably not to blame in this instance.
That makes me think, hmm maybe some of the images don't meet Google's compression standards.
Check out these results (https://gtmetrix.com/reports/flothemes.com/xZARSfi5) for the page / post you referenced, on GTMetrix (I find it superior to Google's Page-Speed Insights) and click on the "Waterfall" tab.
You can see that some of the image files have pretty lard 'bars' in terms of the total time it took to load in those individual resources. The main offenders are this image: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PhilChester-Portfolio-40.jpg (over 2 seconds to pull in by itself) and this one: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Portra-1601-Digital-2.png (around 1.7 seconds to pull in)
Check out the resource URLs. They're being pulled into your page, but they're not hosted on your website. As such - how could Google index those images for your site when they're pulled in externally? Maybe there's some CDN stuff going on here. Maybe Google is indexing some images on the CDN because it's faster and not from your base-domain. This really needs looking into in a lot more detail, but I smell the tails of something interesting there.
If images are deemed to be uncompressed or if their resolution is just way OTT (such that most users would never need even half of the full deployment resolution) - Google won't index those images. Why? Well they don't want Google Images to become a lag-fest I guess!
**Your main issue is that you are not serving 'scaled' images **(or apparently, optimising them). On that same GTMetrix report, check out the "PageSpeed" tab. Yeah, you scored an F by the way (that's a fail) and it's mainly down to your image deployment.
Google thinks one or more of the following:
- You haven't put enough effort into optimising some of your images
- Some of your images are not worth indexing or it can find them somewhere else
- Google is indexing some of the images from your CDN instead of your base domain
- Google is having trouble indexing images for your domain, which are permanently or temporarily stored off-site (and the interference is causing Google to just give up)
I know there's a lot to think about here, but I hope I have at least put you on the 'trail' a reasonable solution
This was fun to examine, so thanks for the interesting question!
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
-
App Indexing
Can anyone please check if our app is indexed or not? Also check if deep linking done is correct or not rel="alternate" href="android-app://in.instafresh.app/http/www.instafrsh.com/" /> Website - http://instafrsh.com/ App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.instafresh.app
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Z-indexed content
I have some content on a page that I am not using any type of css hiding techniques, but I am using an image with a higher z-index in order to prevent the text from being seen until a user clicks a link to have the content scroll down. Are there any negative repercussions for doing this in regards to SEO?
Technical SEO | | cokergroup0 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote
Hi there, Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion? I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high. From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument. However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there. However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved. I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd. However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks. Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page. Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before. Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre. Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause. Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect. Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool. Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences. One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact. Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th. Thanks David
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Index quickly a website? (Google,Bing..)
Hi, I would like to know what are the best practices in 2012 to index our website in less than 24 hours? (or less..) Thanks for your answer 😄
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0