Images
Images are used on websites to provide more engaging experiences for users, while also presenting more information about a topic. While positive for user experience, images can cause issues for a website’s SEO and performance. Our key takeaways from Google’s ongoing SEO Office Hours sessions cover more insights into the impact of unoptimized images, as well as best practice recommendations from Google.
For more on website content best practices for SEO, read our Guide to Optimizing Website Content for Search — or explore our Website Intelligence Academy resources on SEO & Content.
Decorative Images Don’t Need to be Indexed
Decorative images like stock photos don’t need to be indexed because they won’t provide a useful path for users coming to your site from image search. Instead, focus on images that have value for your business such as product images.
Using Stock Photos Will Not Impact Web Search Rankings
The images used on a page don’t have an impact on normal web search rankings. However, within image search Google typically recognise stock photos which are being used on several different sites and will pick just one to be indexed.
Images Implemented Via Lazy Loading Can be Used Like Any Other Image on a Page
Images implemented via the lazy load script can be added to structured data and sitemaps without any issues, as long as they are embedded in a way that Googlebot is able to pick up.
Image URLs Won’t Be Fetched in the GSC URL Inspection Tool
The URL Inspection tool in Search Console is based on search results and will therefore only display web pages. If Google recognises a URL is an image, it will not be fetched with the tool and will most likely display a ‘blocked by robots.txt’ message.
Ensure Embedded Images Are Clearly Marked As Images
If images that are embedded on a site are not clearly marked as images, Google may not be able to see or index these e.g. using CSS to embed images. This is particularly common when the code is different for desktop and mobile versions of a website.
Google Validates That Videos Are a Good Context Match For Pages They Appear on
Google takes longer to index video and images compared to text content. For videos, Google needs to confirm that it is a reasonable video for the page before displaying it in search.
Blocking Images For Googlebot-Image Won’t Impact Web Results
It’s fine to give specific directives for Googlebot-Image which restrict its crawling of images, and this won’t negatively impact regular web search results.
Use Google Developer Console to See How Google Understands Particular Images
Google uses machine learning to better understand images, but it is still important to provide direct context of images through alt text, image captions and surrounding text on the page. John recommends using Google Developer Console to see how your images are understood by Google.
Blocking Images For Googlebot-Image Won’t Impact Web Results
It’s fine to give specific directives for Googlebot-Image which restrict its crawling of images, and this won’t negatively impact regular web search results.
Google Supports X-Robots Noindex to Block Images for Googlebot
Google respects x-robots noindex in image response headers.