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
-
Site appearing and disappearing from google serps.
Hi, My website is normally on page 2-3 on google consistently. Over the past month it has been appearing and then completely disappearing from the serps. One day it will be on page 2, then the next day completely missing from the serps. When i check the index it seems to be indexed correctly when doing site:mysite.com. I don't understand why this keeps happening, any experience with this issue? It doesn't seem to be a google dance as far as I can tell. When my other sites dance they typically just go up or down a few ranks for a couple weeks until they stabilize. Not completely fall off the search engine.
Algorithm Updates | | Chris_www0 -
Tens of duplicate homepages indexed and blocked later: How to remove from Google cache?
Hi community, Due to some WP plugin issue, many homepages indexed in Google with anonymous URLs. We blocked them later. Still they are in SERP. I wonder whether these are causing some trouble to our website, especially as our exact homepages indexed. How to remove these pages from Google cache? Is that the right approach? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Googles Search Intent – Plural & Singular KW’s
This is more of a ‘gripe’ than a question, but I would love to hear people’s views. Typically, when you search for a product using the singular and plural versions of the keyword Google delivers different SERPs. As an example, ‘leather handbag’ and ‘leather handbags’ return different results, but surely the search intent is exactly the same? You’d have thought Google was now clever enough to work this out. We tend to optimise our webpages for both the plural and singular variations of the KW’s, but see a mixed bag of results when analysing rankings. Is Google trying to force us to create a unique webpage for the singular version, and another unique webpage for the plural version? This would confuse the visitor, and make no sense.. the search intent is the same! How do you combat this problem? Many thanks in advance. Lee.
Algorithm Updates | | Webpresence0 -
How to keep damage low on Google after the change of URL's
Hi Peeps, Hope someone can shed a light on this and show a guidance if possible. We are going to move our sites to shopify and shopify's URL's cannot be customized to match exactly like our current URLs. What steps do I need to take so google knows the URL's are changed. Domain will be the same. Thank you in advanced.
Algorithm Updates | | cemalcebi0 -
Meta Title Not Showing up in Google
Hello Friends, I have a website, www.bollywoodshaadis.com. On 1st may we changed our servers and revamped our website as per SEO updated guidelines. For some strange reason Google is not showing site Meta Title when you search the website on Google. All it shows is the domain name in the meta title. However, when you search info:www.bollywoodshaadis.com it shows the right Meta tags. Any reason for this happening? I have never seen this before. Thank you in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | SEOcandy0 -
Does google have the worst site usability?
Google tells us to make our sites better for our readers, which we are doing, but do you think google has horrible site usabilty? For example, in webmaster tools, I'm always being confused by their changes and the way they just drop things. In the HTML suggestions area, they don't tell you when the data was last updated, so the only way to tell is to download the files and check. In the URL removals, they used to show you the URLs they had removed. Now that is gone and the only way you can check is to try adding one. We don't have any URL parameters, so any parameters are as a result of some other site tacking on stuff at the end of our URL and there is no way to tell them that we don't have any parameters, so ignore them all. Also, they add new parameters they find on the end of the list, so the only way to check is to click through to the end of the list.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
SEOMoz reports now that google only reporting the average only the top position
Today Google announced "Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in." Will this affect SEOMoz reports in any way?
Algorithm Updates | | PerriCline0 -
Google's reaction to site updates
Hi, Is it safe to assume as soon as Google indexes updates I've made to my site that any ranking changes the updates effected will happen at that same time, or is there ever a lag time before these changes ( if any ) take effect?
Algorithm Updates | | minutiae0