Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Not all images indexed in Google

    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.

    Not all images indexed in Google

    Technical SEO
    2
    2
    5793
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • flo_seo
      flo_seo last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • effectdigital
        effectdigital last edited by

        Fetching, rendering, caching and indexing are all different. Sometimes they're all part of the same process, sometimes not. When Google 'indexes' images, that's primarily for its image search engine (Google Images). 'Indexing' something means that Google is listing that resource within its own search results for one reason or another. For the same reasons that Google rarely indexes all of your web-pages, Google also rarely indexes all of your images.

        That doesn't mean that Google 'can't see' your images and has an imperfect view of your web-page. It simply means that Google does not believe the image which you have uploaded are 'worthy' enough to be served to an end-user who is performing a certain search on Google images. If you think that gaining normal web rankings is tricky, remember that most users only utilise Google images for certain (specific) reasons. Maybe they're trying to find a meme to add to their post on a form thread or as a comment on a Social network. Maybe they're looking for PNG icons to add into their PowerPoint presentations.

        In general, images from the commercial web are... well, they're commercially driven (usually). When was the last time you expressedly set out to search for Ads to look at on Google images? Never? Ok then.

        First Google will fetch a page or resource by visiting that page or resource's URL. If the resource or web-page is of moderate to high value, Google may then render the page or resource (Google doesn't always do this, but usually it's to get a good view of a page on the web which is important - yet which is heavily modified by something like JS or AJAX - and thus all the info isn't in the basic 'source code' / view-source).

        Following this, Google may decide to cache the web-page or resource. Finally, if the page or resource is deemed worthy enough and Google's algorithm(s) decide that it could potentially satisfy a certain search query (or array thereof) - the resource or page may be indexed. All of this can occur in various patterns, e.g: indexing a resource without caching it or caching a resource without indexing it (there are many reasons for all of this which I won't get into now).

        On the commercial web, many images are stock or boiler-plate visuals from suppliers. If Google already has the image you are supplying indexed at a higher resolution or at superior quality (factoring compression) and if your site is not a 'main contender' in terms of popularity and trust metrics, Google probably won't index that image on your site. Why would Google do so? It would just mean that when users performed an image search, they would see large panes of results which were all the same image. Users only have so much screen real-estate (especially with the advent of mobile browsing popularity). Seeing loads of the same picture at slightly different resolutions would just be annoying. People want to see a variety, a spread of things! **That being said **- your images are lush and I don't think they're stock rips!

        If some images on your page, post or website are not indexed - it's not necessarily an 'issue' or 'error'.

        Looking at the post you linked to: https://flothemes.com/best-lightroom-presets-photogs/

        I can see that it sits on the "flothemes.com" domain. It has very strong link and trust metrics:

        Ahrefs - Domain rating 83

        Moz - Domain Authority - 62

        As such, you'd think that most of these images would be unique (I don't have time to do a reverse image search on all of them) - also because the content seems really well done. I am pretty confident (though not certain) that quality and duplication are probably not to blame in this instance.

        That makes me think, hmm maybe some of the images don't meet Google's compression standards.

        Check out these results (https://gtmetrix.com/reports/flothemes.com/xZARSfi5) for the page / post you referenced, on GTMetrix (I find it superior to Google's Page-Speed Insights) and click on the "Waterfall" tab.

        You can see that some of the image files have pretty lard 'bars' in terms of the total time it took to load in those individual resources. The main offenders are this image: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PhilChester-Portfolio-40.jpg (over 2 seconds to pull in by itself) and this one: https://l5vd03xwb5125jimp1nwab7r-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Portra-1601-Digital-2.png (around 1.7 seconds to pull in)

        Check out the resource URLs. They're being pulled into your page, but they're not hosted on your website. As such - how could Google index those images for your site when they're pulled in externally? Maybe there's some CDN stuff going on here. Maybe Google is indexing some images on the CDN because it's faster and not from your base-domain. This really needs looking into in a lot more detail, but I smell the tails of something interesting there.

        If images are deemed to be uncompressed or if their resolution is just way OTT (such that most users would never need even half of the full deployment resolution) - Google won't index those images. Why? Well they don't want Google Images to become a lag-fest I guess!

        **Your main issue is that you are not serving 'scaled' images **(or apparently, optimising them). On that same GTMetrix report, check out the "PageSpeed" tab. Yeah, you scored an F by the way (that's a fail) and it's mainly down to your image deployment.

        Google thinks one or more of the following:

        • You haven't put enough effort into optimising some of your images
        • Some of your images are not worth indexing or it can find them somewhere else
        • Google is indexing some of the images from your CDN instead of your base domain
        • Google is having trouble indexing images for your domain, which are permanently or temporarily stored off-site (and the interference is causing Google to just give up)

        I know there's a lot to think about here, but I hope I have at least put you on the 'trail' a reasonable solution

        This was fun to examine, so thanks for the interesting question!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • 1 / 1
        • First post
          Last post

        Got a burning SEO question?

        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


        Start my free trial


        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.

        • See all categories

        Related Questions

        • Tom3_15

          Google is indexing bad URLS

          Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!

          Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
          0
        • muzzmoz

          Indexed pages

          Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?

          Technical SEO | | muzzmoz
          1
        • jasny

          How can I get a photo album indexed by Google?

          We have a lot of photos on our website. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be indexed by Google. We run a party website. One of the things we do, is take pictures at events and put them on the site. An event page with a photo album, can have anywhere between 100 and 750 photo's. For each foto's there is a thumbnail on the page. The thumbnails are lazy loaded by showing a placeholder and loading the picture right before it comes onscreen. There is no pagination of infinite scrolling. Thumbnails don't have an alt text. Each thumbnail links to a picture page. This page only shows the base HTML structure (menu, etc), the image and a close button. The image has a src attribute with full size image, a srcset with several sizes for responsive design and an alt text. There is no real textual content on an image page. (Note that when a user clicks on the thumbnail, the large image is loaded using JavaScript and we mimic the page change. I think it doesn't matter, but am unsure.) I'd like that full size images should be indexed by Google and found with Google image search. Thumbnails should not be indexed (or ignored). Unfortunately most pictures aren't found or their thumbnail is shown. Moz is giving telling me that all the picture pages are duplicate content (19,521 issues), as they are all the same with the exception of the image. The page title isn't the same but similar for all images of an album. Example: On the "A day at the park" event page, we have 136 pictures. A site search on "a day at the park" foto, only reveals two photo's of the albums. 3QolbbI.png QTQVxqY.jpg mwEG90S.jpg

          Technical SEO | | jasny
          0
        • ruggero

          Site indexed by Google, but (almost) never gets impressions

          Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!

          Technical SEO | | ruggero
          0
        • Koki.Mourao

          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

          Technical SEO | | Koki.Mourao
          0
        • linklander

          How to check if an individual page is indexed by Google?

          So my understanding is that you can use site: [page url without http] to check if a page is indexed by Google, is this 100% reliable though? Just recently Ive worked on a few pages that have not shown up when Ive checked them using site: but they do show up when using info: and also show their cached versions, also the rest of the site and pages above it (the url I was checking was quite deep) are indexed just fine. What does this mean? thank you p.s I do not have WMT or GA access for these sites

          Technical SEO | | linklander
          0
        • WebServiceConsulting.com

          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.com
          0
        • melen

          Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google

          While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built.  Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed.  What is the best way to solve this problem?  I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?

          Technical SEO | | melen
          0

        Get started with Moz Pro!

        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

        Start my free trial
        Products
        • Moz Pro
        • Moz Local
        • Moz API
        • Moz Data
        • STAT
        • Product Updates
        Moz Solutions
        • SMB Solutions
        • Agency Solutions
        • Enterprise Solutions
        Free SEO Tools
        • Domain Authority Checker
        • Link Explorer
        • Keyword Explorer
        • Competitive Research
        • Brand Authority Checker
        • MozBar Extension
        • MozCast
        Resources
        • Blog
        • SEO Learning Center
        • Help Hub
        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
        • How-to Guides
        • Moz Academy
        • API Docs
        About Moz
        • About
        • Team
        • Careers
        • Contact
        Why Moz
        • Case Studies
        • Testimonials
        Get Involved
        • Become an Affiliate
        • MozCon
        • Webinars
        • Practical Marketer Series
        • MozPod
        Connect with us

        Contact the Help team

        Join our newsletter
        Moz logo
        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
        • Accessibility
        • Terms of Use
        • Privacy

        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.