Why Updating Images Can Backfire - Search Engine Journal

Google's John Mueller shares that indexing images is slow, which can negatively impact image heavy sites that update their images

See which organic keywords actually drive conversions

Replace (not provided) with actual keywords and monitor their specific performance metrics in Google Analytics.

Try For Free

In a recent Google Office Hours, John Mueller offered feedback about how slowly Google indexes images and how that could be a problem if you’re making massive changes to thousands of images.

When asked what would help, Mueller noted that many of the solutions asked about would have no effect and that the only thing that provided meaningful help in getting new images indexed was a fast server response.

Updated Images Not Indexed For Months

The person asking the question gave an example of updating 50,000 recipe images and how that what happened next had a negative impact on the recipe site.

The person asked:

“If you have lots and lots of recipes indexed in the recipe gallery and you change the format of your images, as the metadata is refreshed, you might have 50,000 of the recipes get new metadata.

But there is a deferral process for actually getting the new images.

And it could be months before those new images have been picked up.”

He next shared that when you test in Search Console, search console reports back that there’s no problem, because it sees the images when it checks for it. But that doesn’t mean that the new and updated image is indexed, which it is not.

Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.