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
-
How do I access the old search console?
Hello, Moz community! I need to access the old search console in order to submit a change of address. I used to be able to switch from a toggle on the main menu, but I can't seem to find that anymore. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can access it?
Technical SEO | | eddiewang250 -
Sudden site drop google, not banned or penalised?
Hi all, We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
Technical SEO | | jkossel
-> Setup google webmasters tools
no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok,
-> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake.
-> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed.
-> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
-> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100 So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg. by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right. Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!1 -
Drupal, http/https, canonicals and Google Search Console
I’m fairly new in an in-house role and am currently rooting around our Drupal website to improve it as a whole. Right now on my radar is our use of http / https, canonicals, and our use of Google Search Console. Initial issues noticed: We serve http and https versions of all our pages Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use) We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA I’ve spoken with our IT agency who migrated our old site to the current site, who have recommended forcing all pages to https and setting canonicals to all https pages, which is fine in theory, but I don’t think it’s as simple as this, right? An old Moz post I found talked about running into issues with images/CSS/javascript referencing http – is there anything else to consider, especially from an SEO perspective? I’m assuming that the appropriate certificates are in place, as the secure version of the site works perfectly well. And on the last point – am I safe to assume we have just never tracked any traffic for the secure version of the site? 😞 Thanks John
Technical SEO | | joberts0 -
How to remove Parameters from Google Search Console?
Hi All, Following are parameter configuration in search console - Parameters - fl
Technical SEO | | adamjack
Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - Yes, Changes, reorders, or narrows page content.
How does this parameter affect page content? - Narrow
Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? - Let Googlebot decide (Default) Query - Actually it is filter parameter. I have already set canonical on filter page. Now I am doing tracking of filter pages via data layer and tag manager so in google analytic I am not able to see filter url's because of this parameter. So I want to delete this parameter. Can anyone please help me? Thanks!0 -
How do I direct users to site page when they search vanity URL?
My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?
Technical SEO | | jarjarjarvis0 -
Why are my images not being indexed?
I have submitted an image sitemap with over 2,000 images yet only about 35 have been indexed. Could you please help me understand why Google is not indexing my images? www.creative-calendars.com
Technical SEO | | nicole20140 -
Big Increase in 404 Errors after Google Custom Search Engine Install on Website
My URL is: http://www.furniturefashion.comHi forum.I recently installed a Custom Google Search Engine (https://www.google.com/cse/) on my blog about ten days ago. Since then my 404 errors in Webmaster Tools has skyrocketed by several thousand. I had not had an issue before. Once it was installed the 404 errors started appearing. What's interesting is that all the errors have the URL then the word "undefined" at the end. I have attached a screen shot from my Webmaster Tools dashboard. Also, there are a few examples below of what the URLs are that have the 404 errors.wood_closet_organizer_to_improve_space_utilization/undefinedsmall-sweet-10-inspiring-small-kitchen-designs/undefined Has anyone had this issue? I very much want the search engine on my site, but not at the expense of several thousand 404 errors. My site queries has been going down since the installation of the custom search engine. Here is some of the code that I have below that I took off my site doing a "view source". Any help would be greatly appreciated.href='http://cdn.furniturefashion.com/wp-content/plugins/google-custom-search/css/smoothness/jquery-ui-1.7.3.custom.css?ver=3.9.2' type='text/css' media='all' />rel='stylesheet' id='gsc_style_search_bar-css' href='http://www.google.com/cse/style/look/minimalist.css?ver=3.9.2' type='text/css' media='all' />rel='stylesheet' id='gsc_style_search_bar_more-css' href='http://cdn.furniturefashion.com/wp-content/plugins/google-custom-search/css/gsc.css?ver=3.9.2' type='text/css' media='all' />< uXRSEkC
Technical SEO | | will21120 -
High search volume and low CTR
I have a two words domain with exact match keyword volume of over 1 millions local monthly search and CTR of 0.2% at average position of 6.6. Competition for this keywords is low. Shouldn't I be getting at least 5-10% at that position? Thanks, tb 7IhQQop.png
Technical SEO | | techbytes0