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.
Deindexed from Google images Sep17th
-
We have a travel website that has been ranked in Google for 12-14years. The site produces original images with branding on them and have been for years ranking well. There's been no site changes. We have a Moz spamscore 1/17 and Domain Authority 59.
Sep 17th all our images just disappeared from Google Image Search. Even searching for our domain with keyword photo results in nothing. I've checked our Search console and no email from Google and I see no postings on Moz and others relating to search algo changes with Images. I'm at a loss here.. does anyone have some advice?
-
Thanks for posting your follow up. We're still waiting to see restoration of our images and it's been 13 days.
-
As a final follow up. We removed the script that redirected people from going directly to our photos from image search. Requested that the manual action be removed, and the day that they removed it ALL RANKINGS WERE RESTORED!
While while this doesn't resolve the fact that big G allows users to take advantage of our service without visiting our website, it is a huge relief to know we aren't starting from the ground up.
-
Yup,
That was the ticket Dan. Webmaster reports the same manual action for my site.
It seems like a bit of a crack down on those that tried to avoid having users go straight to the photos hosted on a website.
This is a difficult situation for me, not just for loosing countless number 1 image positions for great keywords, but because the point of my site is to offer free stock photos. If users can search for them and hit the full resolution without visiting my website, then its just a drain on bandwidth.I have taken out the script that causes the URL rewrite, but considering Google image search brings 70% of my traffic, what would you guys suggest?
-
Good luck with your recovery!
-
Hey Dan,
Glad I read to the end as I was about to suggest looking at this. A client of mine was also hit very recently with something similar and it was rogue code that was carried over from one version to another.
Glad all is sorted
-Andy
-
We were just advised of a manual action from using an anti-hotlinking tool. This is old code from years ago so they must be just implementing this guideline now.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?ctx=MAC
-
It may not just be you. I just noticed the same thing happened to my website on 9/7.
Google webmaster reported an average of 2500 clicks per day from image search for the last year, then on the 7th 0, and not a click since then.
I just now noticed because I do not check analytics very often. I have a question though, when Google changed image search they made it easier for a customer to click directly to the photo without loading the website or getting an impression. To circumvent this some websites would change htaccess to detect this, and overlay the graphic, or cause the direct link to redirect to the page with the photo on it. I had one of these redirects, and now I cannot find anyone on Google Image search with that overlay or redirect. You can tell when a site had it implemented because the original small resolution wouldn't enhance, it would stay pixilated, I assume because Google couldn't access it directly.
I will keep investigating. Thoughts?
For more information. Webmaster doesn't report any change in page index, or any other warnings. The script mentioned is a rewrite rule in htaccess that changes the url to point to the source page rather than the direct photo
-
Bummer. This smells of a technical change that occurred on your site.
Check: robots.txt - are you blocking access to images? You can also look in Search Console and under Crawl use the Robots.txt tester and see if your image URLs fail there. It will show you where the issue is.
Check things like all your images got moved to a CDN and no 301 redirects from the old image URLs were put in place.
Talk to your dev and look at every ticket prior to Sept 17th and see if there is anything else that was changed.
The good news is that if this is something technical and you fix it quickly, you should recover.
Good luck!
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 Cache
So, when I gain a link I always check to see if the page that is linking is in the Google cache. I've noticed recently that more and more pages are actually not showing up in Google's cache, yet still appear in search results. I did read an article from someone whoo works at Google a few weeks back that there is sometimes an error with the cache and occasionally the cache will not display. This week, my own website isn't showing up in the cache yet I'm still ranking in SERP's. I'm not worried about it, mostly whitehat, but has there been any indication that Google are phasing out the ability to check cache's of websites?
Algorithm Updates | | ThorUK0 -
Best and easiest Google Depersonalization method
Hello, Moz hasn't written anything about depersonalization for years. This article has methods, but I don't know if they are valid anymore. What's an easy, effective way to depersonalize Google search these days? I would just log out of Google, but that shows different ranking results than Moz's rank tracker for one of our main keywords, so I don't know if that method is correct. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BobGW0 -
How long for google to de-index old pages on my site?
I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
http://studio35design.com0 -
My Website No Longer Appears in Mobile Google Search but Does in Desktop...Why Is This?
For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW0 -
Does a KML file have to be indexed by Google?
I'm currently using the Yoast Local SEO plugin for WordPress to generate my KML file which is linked to from the GeoSitemap. Check it out http://www.holycitycatering.com/sitemap_index.xml. A competitor of mine just told me that this isn't correct and that the link to the KML should be a downloadable file that's indexed in Google. This is the opposite of what Yoast is saying... "He's wrong. 🙂 And the KML isn't a file, it's being rendered. You wouldn't want it to be indexed anyway, you just want Google to find the information in there. What is the best way to create a KML? Should it be indexed?
Algorithm Updates | | projectassistant1 -
Lost 50% google traffic in one day - panic?
Hi girls + guys, a site of us were hit by a google update or a google penalty. We have lost 50% google traffic in one day (25th april, 2012). (Total visitors in average per day: 6k, yesterday: 3k) It's a german website, so I think google.de (germany) was updated. Our rankings in google.at (austria) are also affected, but it's not that bad as in google.de. We have not done any specific on page seo activities in the last two months. GWT doesn't have any message for us (no critical errors). After my first analyse I can say this: google has indexed 17k pages (thats fine) we are on 1st place with our domain name the last three days, the google traffic went up (+20%), but yesterday it was 50% below average (so -70%) last week we had a very good day, we had twice the traffic than normal, but this calmed down the following days we have lost number no. 1 places at two high traffic keywords. We had these no 1 rankings for years. We have been outranked by two of our competitors, but they have not done any onpage changes. We have lost a lot of positions at a lot of keywords. But there are also keywords which moved up. We have good content, useres are visiting 5 pages in average. No virus, no hacker (no hidden cloaking page) it's an old domain (2002) Lot of (good) inbound links Lot's of likes, g+. Good twitter activty. So, all in all I think it's more likely a ranking algo change than a penalty (a penalty for what reason?) My specific question(s): Is there any "check list" which could help me to find out the reason for this mess? What is the best strategy to regain the positions? New HTML code? New On page seo? (seomoz grades most of our important pages an A) Any idea would be appreciated! Best wishes,
Algorithm Updates | | GeorgFranz
Georg.1 -
Rankings changing every couple of MINUTES in Google?
We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?
Algorithm Updates | | d4online0 -
Why google index ip address instead of the domain name？
I have a website ,now google index ip address of it instead of the domain name,I have used 301 redirected to the domain name,but how to change the index IP to its domain name? And why google index the IP address?
Algorithm Updates | | frankfans1170