How to manage images
-
We have been using Google+ to load our images straight on to our site, we did this to make sure our site loaded fast. google+ delivers them to website at the size we specify, so even if original is say 4000px x 3000px we can ask for them at 100x100 and they send as resized scale. we dont have to manage sizes just the original images and their tagging
If we wanted to improve our SEO opportunities should we be doing this another way? Our images show if you look in the image serp but they dont appear on the main serp.
How much of a difference would having the images on our own domain rather than having them on Google+
I am working through the recommended list below, would love to hear guys who are doing well with images and have to manage 1000's of them.
There are a number of ways to optimise your images to increase your visibility within Google image search, and the chance of being featured within the main search results (as seen in the 'tablet PC' example):
Use a short descriptive piece of text featuring desired keywords within the image alt text attribute.
Save the image using a descriptive file name
Create an Image XML sitemap
Ensure your images directory isn't blocked by robots.txt
Ideally host images on the same domain
And surround the image with related text content to build a stronger page context/association -
Hi mark,
Firstly I do not think that they suppose to rank on normal serp....if you got the rank on google image serp thats the best you will get. The 15th of November update focused on Google Image SERP and did boost lots of web sites that have dedicated landing pages with image presentation about specific products. It happened in one of my test blogs I use for testing various techniques to see what work and what doesnt.
I did none of the optimisations you mention above, but I did on-page optimise the web page that hosts the image for the keywords I wanted it to rank, used top navigation anchors and that was it. No image alt tag, no resizing, nothing. Google just picked it up and ranked it.
As I was testing the blog for link building and not image rankings that is what i can offer you atm and that was the effect it had on me with the 14th of november update. We are talking about 83.000% increase on impressions on Google Webmaster tools. so all I can advise is, do have a landing page with all your image products there but optimise the landing page for the keywords and not the image itself necessarily. Ofcourse doing the latter wont harm you but make sure that the page is optimised as well to be on the best/perfect side.
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
-
Text over image
Hello, I am creating an overlay on a image. Is it ok to write on this overlay in html or it is better to have the text not on a image for google and other search engines ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha0 -
How to maximize CTR from Google image search?
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context. Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through? Thanks, Tony FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Alt tag for src='blank.gif' on lazy load images
I didn't find an answer on a search on this, so maybe someone here has faced this before. I am loading 20 images that are in the viewport and a bit below. The next 80 images I want to 'lazy-load'. They therefore are seen by the bot as a blank.gif file. However, I would like to get some credit for them by giving a description in the alt tag. Is that a no-no? If not, do they all have to be the same alt description since the src name is the same? I don't want to mess things up with Google by being too aggressive, but at the same time those are valid images once they are lazy loaded, so would like to get some credit for them. Thanks! Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?
I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems0 -
Managing Google Map Location for a remote wilderness lodge
Hi all, I’m working on a Google Maps and Google Plus issue for a client who runs a unique, very remote wilderness lodge. The lodge isn’t located near any road -- you have to fly 100+ miles on a small plane. Their mailing address is a PO Box in a dingy little town 100+ miles from their actual mountain location. Therefore, Google maps and Google Plus think the lodge itself is located in this little town, and it shows them there on maps. That’s bad, because the kind of guests who come to this remote lodge wouldn’t want to stay in that little town. We would like Google to understand that the lodge’s location is not the same as its mailing address. We have the GPS coordinates for the actual location. My question is: how do I get Google Plus and Google Maps to correctly show the lodge pin at its GPS location on the map, rather than in the town that hosts its remote PO box? Thanks for reading! Any insights?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bzmark0 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeanAndrews
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years. According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say 'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. ' My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.0