Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
-
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange).
Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once?
Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)?
Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue.
Thanks.
-
I don't think it would be too bad. A cleaner name would be better but having the new images show is important too. More important in my opinion.
-
Would adding version information to the end of an image name be bad for SEO? Should I rename all of the images instead? We are unlikely to change the thumbnail again, so this issue shouldn't happen again (at least not in the foreseeable future).
-
Google may have the images cached and not realize you have new ones. One rule of thumb I try to promote is to always use unique image names. You may find your customers also see old images if an image of the same name already resides in the browser cache. I encourage our marketing folks to add a date stamp to the end of an image so it will be seen as new. Versioning will work as well.
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
-
Google Search Console Not Sending Messages
One of our sites received a Manual Penalty for unnatural links by Google. However, we never received a message in Google Search Console or an email about the manual action. The only reason we knew about the penalty is by the obvious drop in rankings, then signing into search console to look for any manual actions, which we found. Since then, we have submitted a disavow file and a reconsideration request. However, once again we did not receive an email or message in search console that shows confirmation of the disavow or that they received the reconsideration request. The disavow file does show up after I upload it, and it says it was successfully uploaded... but no messages or emails. After many hours of investigating the various canonical versions of our website on Search Console, we found out that there were several “owners” of the various canonical versions of our site that had “could not find the email address” as a site owner. We found out that these were previous employees who no longer worked with the company and their email address was deleted. After unverifying these site owners, (all the ones that had “could not find the email address” as the site owner), the notifications, emails and messages in Search Console started to appear. However, the only place they did not appear, is the main canonical version of our site. Of course, the main canonical version of our site (https://www) is the version that we uploaded the disavow and reconsideration request. This is the canonical version of the site that we need to receive these messages to know if our reconsideration request was granted! We’ve just reuploaded the disavow file and reconsideration request to all of the other canonical versions (2 of the 3 received the message about the penalty)…. and we are currently awaiting a response. Has anybody else had problems with not receiving notifications in search console due to deleted email addresses?
Technical SEO | | Fiyyazp0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
How to show number of products in your Google SERP?
I have used to rich snippet to my website & everything is working fine except showing the total number of products listed in the particular category. Check out the screenshot below: aH7XM
Technical SEO | | promodirect0 -
How google crawls images and which url shows as source?
Hi, I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example: This is a page of a hotel in booking.com: http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?
Technical SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Removing images from site and Image Sitemap SEO advice
Hello again, I have received an update request where they want me to remove images from this site (as of now its a bunch of thumbnails) current page design: http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/car-wraps/ and turn it into a new design which utilized a slider (such as this): http://1stimpressions.com/portfolio/ They don't want the thumbnails on the page anymore. My question is since my site has a image sitemap that has been indexed will removing all the images hurt my SEO greatly? What would the recommended steps to take to reduce any SEO damage be, if so? Thank you again for your help, always great and very helpful feedback! 🙂 cheers!
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Why is my site jumping around in google search ?
Hi I've been trying to get my page up in google results and I was wondering why the constant fluctuation. For example, on one day the pages is nr. 26, the next day it's nr. 65 then jumps back on say 30 and then in a few more days it's going back to 50. What's the logic behind that ? Thanks Cezar
Technical SEO | | sparts1 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0
