Option to index images? Or option to index image attachment pages? I've not seen the first, but I have de-indexed attachment pages because I didn't have time to make them all unique. Where do I find the option to not index images? And why would that make SEO scores better?

I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them.

Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?

Thanks Dirk, that's helpful. I'm not sure why the images are fuzzy on Google Image Search but those ones are rather small (576PX, whereas most of my images on newer posts are 800PX or even 1024PX). I don't know what size images work best for previewing on Google.

I do get into the image search strip for some search terms. Do you know how to track views of images (as distinct from click through to pages) at all? Is there a script I could be running on my VPS which would track view of images from Google Image Search?

I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context.

Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through?

Thanks, Tony

FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".

Hi guys, thanks for picking that up. Don't know why I missed it! GA code was in the header.php of the old theme and was lost when I switched themes. I've added it back now so I'll see what happens.

I can see how that would have impacted the search traffic graph on Moz Pro, but I'm still not sure if it would have affected how Moz reports my keyword rankings. Did I really suffer big drops in the SERPs as Moz reported? Or was it just a side-effect of Moz not being able to see traffic in my GA account?

Tony

Hi Kyle, thanks for taking a look. No, my keyword rankings took a hit (48 up, 149 down) over the past week but I am still ranking for lots of keywords. About half of my #1-3 keywords dropped back to #4-10. If this keeps up I expect my keywords will take a much bigger hit. In fact I am already seeing evidence of that. My URL http://www.travelnasia.com/thailand/wararot-chiang-mai-day-market/ shows in Moz as still ranking #1 for "Wararot Chiang Mai day market" on Friday but in fact I now don't even list on the first 3 pages of results.

When you say I have a lot of 404s on my site, where are you getting that info? As of Friday, Moz shows 37 404 errors on the site and many of those are leftovers from dropping my premium theme (e.g. placecategory instead of category). But I should fix them, I agree.

And yes, none of that really points to why Google would stop sending me any search traffic, and yet that seems to be what's happened.

I've added some screenshots below which may be helpful.  I am still getting traffic, but not from organic search.

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On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering.

Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it.

There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered.

I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it.

The clues I'm seeing include:

• Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem.

• GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors.

• On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely.

I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty?

Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.