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.
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
-
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Is Base64 encoding images in general better for SEO or worse?
We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general. One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK. My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Tools/Software that can crawl all image URLs in a site
Excluding Screaming Frog, what other tools/software to use in order to crawl all image URLs in a site? Because in Screaming Frog, they don't crawl image URLs which are not under the site domain. Example of an image URL outside the client site: http://cdn.shopify.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png If the client is: http://www.example.com, Screaming Frog only crawls images under it like, http://www.example.com/images/this-is-just-a-sample.png
Technical SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Should a sub domain be a separate property in the Search Console?
We're launching a blog on a sub-domain of a corp site (blog.corpsite.com). We already have corpsite.com set up in the Search Console. Should I set up a separate property for this sub-domain in the Search Console (WMT) in order to manage it? Is it necessary? Thanks, JM
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How does a search engine bot navigate past a .PDF link?
We have a large number of product pages that contain links to a .pdf of the technical specs for that product. These are all set up to open in a new window when the end user clicks. If these pages are being crawled, and a bot follows the link for the .pdf, is there any way for that bot to continue to crawl the site, or does it get stuck on that dangling page because it doesn't contain any links back to the site (it's a .pdf) and the "back" button doesn't work because the page opened in a new window? If this situation effectively stops the bot in its tracks and it can't crawl any further, what's the best way to fix this? 1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute 2. Don't open the link in a new window so the back button remains finctional 3. Both 1 and 2 or 4. Create specs on the page instead of relying on a .pdf Here's an example page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/mackie-cfx12-mkii-compact-mixer - The technical spec .pdf is located under the "Downloads" tab [the content is all on one page in the source code - the tabs are just a design element] Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Loss of search engine positions after 301 redirect - what went wrong?!?
Hi Guys After adhering to the On Page optimisation suggestions given by SEOmoz, we redirected some of old urls to new ones. We set 301 redirects from the old pages to new on a page by page basis but our search engine ranking subsequently fell off the radar and lost PR. We confirmed redirection with fiddler and it shows 301 permanent redirect on every page as expected. To manage redirection using a common code logic we executed following: In Http module, using “rewrite path” we route “all old page requests” to a page called “redirect.aspx? oldpagename =[oldpagename]”. This happens at server side. In redirect.aspx we are redirecting from old page to new page using 301 permanent redirect. In the browser, when old page is requested, it will 301 redirect to new page. In hope we and others can learn from our mistakes - what did we do wrong ?!? Thanks in advance. Dave - www.paysubsonline.com
Technical SEO | | Evo0 -
Image Size for SEO
Hi there I have a website which has some png images on pages, around 300kb - is this too much? How many kbs a page, to what extent do you know does Google care about page load speed? is every kb important, is there a limit? Any advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0