Google Indexed Images: Website Vs Social Media

[g3mmab]

I use Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram to post images that are already featured on my website. I have been following a routine of uploading the images to these social media platforms only after I can see Google has indexed the image from my original site. My website is ecommerce and the product images drive sales more than any other factor.

The thinking behind my method was that when these images are posted on Pinterest, Twitter and the various Instagram crawler sites (I realise Instagram images aren’t indexed directly), Google would recognise that the image was already attributed to my website. The ‘duplicate’ image would not therefore be indexed and the originally uploaded website image would remain in ‘Google Images’.

After completing various searches and reviewing other Q&A’s on Moz, it seems as though this is in no way guaranteed and images reposted on social media platforms may still replace the already indexed image from the website. I am assuming this is because Google views these platforms as more authoritative than mine.

I usually change the image by adding logos, text, backgrounds, borders etc before posting on Pinterest and this seems to have worked most of the time (both the original and ‘amended for Pinterest’ versions are often indexed) but images posted on other platforms are usually identical.

Does it make sense to continue with my method or am I shooting myself in the foot by reposting these images on social media at all? I obviously want customers searching for products, who then click on an image, to be directed to my site rather than one of my social media pages or worse, an image reposting site.

Additionally, If I post images on social media before they are uploaded to my website (for example to tease a product launch), would Google likely class these images as the ‘original’ and therefore be less likely to index the website version of the image once it is uploaded?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[JohnSammon]

Hey there! This is a fantastic question. I would continue the process of posting your images to social as it will improve the probability of people finding you either way. I know it's tedious but if you find that you get a presence in image search on your site and in Google with both, I would keep it up. You can create a custom action in photoshop where you just take an image into that and it'll brand it with a few clicks (you may have been doing that already).

I commend your diligence on doing both as an A/B experiment. I would love to know if these image searches via pinterest are driving response via your site (sales/leads).

Thanks!

John