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.
Image Search
-
Hello Community,
I have been reading and researching about image search and trying to find patterns within the results but unfortunately I could not get to a conclusion on 2 matters. Hopefully this community would have the answers I am searching for.
1) Watermarked Images (To remove or not to remove watermark from photos) I see a lot of confusion on this subject and am pretty much confused myself. Although it might be true that watermarked photos do not cause a punishment, it sure does not seem to help.
At least in my industry and on a bunch of different random queries I have made, watermarked images are hard to come by on Google's images results. Usually the first results do not have any watermarks.
I have read online that Google takes into account user behavior and most users prefer images with no watermark. But again, it is something "I have read online" so I don't have any proof. I would love to have further clarification and, if possible, a definite guide on how to improve my image results.
2) Multiple nested folders (Folder depth)
Due to speed concerns our tech guys are using 1 image per folder and created a convoluted folder structure where the photos are actually 9 levels deep. Most of our competition and many small Wordpress blogs outrank us on Google images and on ALL INSTANCES I have checked, their photos are 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. Never inside 9 nested folders.
So...A) Should I consider removing the watermark - which is not that intrusive but is visible?
B) Should I try to simplify the folder structure for my photos?Thank you
-
Thank you very much. This is helpful.
Sincerely,
Koki
-
Hi Mike
On the watermark question I would personally remove the watermark as I believe you will find that whether watermarks impact your ranking or not putting people of clicking and interacting with your images is a negative.
I would also do it from a quality point of view and I would draw your attention to Google's Guidelines on Image Publishing
"Similarly, some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won't impact your image's performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results."
I imagine you have already had a look at this and I would recommend you go with your findings on this.
Here are Google's guidelines to Image Publishing - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016
I would also remove the watermark from you images in terms of wanting people to use images and then doing a reverse image search to find sites that use them. I would then request attribution if you haven't already been given it - great way to get exposure.
I would also try to simplify your folder structure as 9 levels deep is very deep and likely to make Googles crawl of your images less efficient. I don't understand the reasoning of an individual image per folder - something more like images segmented by subject or even month like default WordPress would make more sense.
Do you have an image sitemap in place? If not here is some more info from Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
Hope this helps
Matt
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
-
Safety Data Sheet PDFs are Showing Higher in Search Results than Product Pages
I have a client who just launched an updated website that has WooCommerce added to it. The website also has a page of Safety Data Sheets that are PDFs that contain information about some of the products. When we do a Google search for many of the products the Safety Data Sheets show up first in the search results instead of the product pages. Has anyone had this happen and know how to solve the issue?
Technical SEO | | teamodea0 -
Google Search Console "Text too small to read" Errors
What are the guidelines / best practices for clearing these errors? Google has some pretty vague documentation on how to handle this sort of error. User behavior metrics in GA are pretty much in line with desktop usage and don't show anything concerning Any input is appreciated! Thanks m3F3uOI
Technical SEO | | Digital_Reach2 -
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
How to remove Parameters from Google Search Console?
Hi All, Following are parameter configuration in search console - Parameters - fl
Technical SEO | | adamjack
Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? - Yes, Changes, reorders, or narrows page content.
How does this parameter affect page content? - Narrow
Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? - Let Googlebot decide (Default) Query - Actually it is filter parameter. I have already set canonical on filter page. Now I am doing tracking of filter pages via data layer and tag manager so in google analytic I am not able to see filter url's because of this parameter. So I want to delete this parameter. Can anyone please help me? Thanks!0 -
Are images stored in Amazon S3 buckets indexable to your domain?
We're storing all our images in S3 bucket, common practice, but we want to get these images to drive traffic back to our site -- and credit for that traffic. We've configured the URLs to be s3.owler.com/<image_name>/<image_id>. I've not seen any of these images show in our web master tools. I am wondering if we're actually not going to get the credit for these images because technically they do sit on another domain. </image_id></image_name>
Technical SEO | | mindofmiller0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Image search and CDNs
Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength. Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain. Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength? Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools? Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Do search engines treat 307 redirects differently from 302 redirects?
We will need to send our users to an alternate version of our homepage for a few hours for a certain event. The SEO task at hand is to minimize the chance of the special homepage getting crawled and cached in the search engines in place of our normal homepage. (This has happened in the past so the concern is not imaginary.) Among other options, 302 and 307 redirects are being discussed. IE, redirecting www.domain.com to www.domain.com/specialpage. Having used 302s and 301s in the past, I am well aware of how search engines treat them. A 302 effectively says "Hey, Google! Please get rid of the old content on www.domain.com and replace it with the content on /specialpage!" Which is exactly what we don't want. My question is: do the search engines handle 307s any differently? I am hearing that the 307 does NOT result in the content of the second page being cached with the first URL. But I don't see that in the definition below (from w3.org). Then again, why differentiate it from the 302? 307 Temporary Redirect The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection MAY be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field. The temporary URI SHOULD be given by the Location field in the response. Unless the request method was HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s) , since many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 307 status. Therefore, the note SHOULD contain the information necessary for a user to repeat the original request on the new URI. If the 307 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction0