How can I stop google indexing an image
-
I have put a map of cornwall on my site on the Corwnall Page, and for some reason Google.de has picked it up and shows it up in the top 4 images for a search for cornwall?
The result is I am getting about 80% of the traffic coming to my site for the search Cornwall (I get about 50 unique visits per day, over 40 a day are landing on the Cornwall page.
Is this a problem for my normal SEO as a Close up Magician?
Will google start to think my site is about Cornwall?
Should I noindex the image (I say that like I know how! - How do I noindex that image? )
Or is any traffic to a site good traffic, I imagine they will be clicking on the link landing on the page and then leaving, which I suspect is not good for google reputation.
Any thoughts anyone
Thanks
Roger
Where they land
-
Davinia is correct In my opinion. There is no reason to not want the image indexed.
-
Hi Roger,
I’m a believer in quality over quantity, so having a website indexed for a relevant search query is important.
You could deindex this image, or you could use this as an opportunity to ‘fix’ the current placement and increase your visibility on search engine result pages to those specifically looking for a magician in Cornwall and those looking for event ideas in Cornwall.
I’d recommend changing your image name from “map-of-cornwall.jpg” to something more in line with what you do e.g. “magician-in-cornwall.jpg” and also change your alt tag from “Map of Cornwall” to “Magician hire in Cornwall” – or something similar. You could also add a call-to-action link for “Booking events in Cornwall” and don’t forget to update the heading of the map image as well. This will help search engines to better understand your websites relationship with Cornwall.
If you want to deindex you can use the robots.txt file (just add to the one you already have http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/robots.txt) – Here is Googles instructions on how to remove images from Google image search https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35308?hl=en
Good luck,
Davinia -
Google may well see an association between your site and Cornwall because of the image (and other factors, the mentions you make of Cornwall on your site for example) but that's a good thing, as it's an area that you cover/target. Your site is first and foremost about you being a magician so I don't think you have anything negative to worry about with the map - if Google has made an association with your site and Cornwall, it should help you rank better in the local Cornwall search results.
-
You can deindex the image using a robots.txt rule, however, any extra traffic you can get from it is better than nothing right? Why bother?
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
-
Removed Subdomain Sites Still in Google Index
Hey guys, I've got kind of a strange situation going on and I can't seem to find it addressed anywhere. I have a site that at one point had several development sites set up at subdomains. Those sites have since launched on their own domains, but the subdomain sites are still showing up in the Google index. However, if you look at the cached version of pages on these non-existent subdomains, it lists the NEW url, not the dev one in the little blurb that says "This is Google's cached version of www.correcturl.com." Clearly Google recognizes that the content resides at the new location, so how come the old pages are still in the index? Attempting to visit one of them gives a "Server Not Found" error, so they are definitely gone. This is happening to a couple of sites, one that was launched over a year ago so it doesn't appear to be a "wait and see" solution. Any suggestions would be a huge help. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | SarahLK0 -
Sitemap indexation
3 days ago I sent in a new sitemap for a new platform. Its 23.412 pages but until now its only 4 pages (!!) that are indexed according to the Webmaster Tools. Why so few? Our stage-enviroment got indexed (more than 50K pages) in a few days by a mistake.
Technical SEO | | Morten_Hjort0 -
Indexing Problem
My URL is: www.memovalley.comWe have submitted our sitemap last month and we are having issues seeing our URLs listed in the search results. Even though our sitemaps contain over 200 URLs, we only currently only have 7 listed (excluding blog.memovalley.com).Can someone help us with this? | |
Technical SEO | | Memovalley
| | | | It looks like Googlebot has timed out, at least once, for one of our URLs. Why is Googlebot timing out? My server is located at Amazon WS, in North Carolina and it is a small instance. Could Google be querying multiple URLs at the same time and jamming my servers? Could it be becauseThanks for your help!0 -
Sill cant seem to get images indexed by Goolge
Hi I've been trying for months now to get our images indexed by Google Would love to know if anyone can see a reason why they haven't here is the sitemap http://www.tidy-books.com/sitemapseosuite/US/sitemapUS2.xml Also 54 pages were submitted but only 9 have been indexed? Any help would be great Thanks
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
How can we get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine
hi, i have a website which is a lifestyle magazine www.in2town.co.uk before we had to build out site from scratch due to a major error from our hosting company we ranked number one for the word lifestyle magazine but since then we have always ranked number five. This week that has dropped to number seven and i would like to know, what do we need to do to let google know we are a lifestyle magazine. I am not sure what we need to do. i know we should have important keywords on the home page but i am not sure where to put these without making the site look silly. can anyone let me know if we should have an introduction and if so where shall we put this. we would really like to increase our page rank for lifestyle magazine but are struggling to know where to put text that will not make the site look silly. Also, can anyone let me know what other keywords we should be aiming for please; We are currently making major changes to our site to make it better.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google is keeping very old title tags in the SERPs for my site. How can I fix this?
Hi Around 6 months ago a site I work with changed its brand. One company became two. Despite changing the title when a new site went live around 6 months ago Google still picks up the old title for certain search results relevant to the old title. When a search result is relevant to the new title it shows that. It's very frustrating as we are trying to re-brand and do not want the old brand name showing for some very important search results. Thanks in advance for your help Paul
Technical SEO | | pauldoffman0