• seohunters9

        See all notifications

        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
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • 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.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          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.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • 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.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • 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.

          • 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
        • My Q&A
        • 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
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        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

            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

            • SpartMoz

              Google Showing wrong image in the SERPS

              Hi Guys, In organic SERPS Google pulling incorrect product image, instead of product image its showing image from relevant products, Checked the structured data, og:image everything is set to the product image, not sure why google showing images from relevant product sidebar, any help, please?

              Technical SEO | | SpartMoz
              0
            • SS.Digital

              Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain

              We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record.  We use Google Mail internally.  The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.

              Technical SEO | | SS.Digital
              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
            • kirmeliux

              Will Google Recrawl an Indexed URL Which is No Longer Internally Linked?

              We accidentally introduced Google to our incomplete site. The end result: thousands of pages indexed which return nothing but a "Sorry, no results" page. I know there are many ways to go about this, but the sheer number of pages makes it frustrating. Ideally, in the interim, I'd love to 404 the offending pages and allow Google to recrawl them, realize they're dead, and begin removing them from the index. Unfortunately, we've removed the initial internal links that lead to this premature indexation from our site. So my question is, will Google revisit these pages based on their own records (as in, this page is indexed, let's go check it out again!), or will they only revisit them by following along a current site structure? We are signed up with WMT if that helps.

              Technical SEO | | kirmeliux
              0
            • FedeEinhorn

              Google not pulling my favicon

              Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?

              Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn
              0
            • TomLondon

              Pages removed from Google index?

              Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks

              Technical SEO | | TomLondon
              0
            • anand2010

              How to remove a sub domain from Google Index!

              Hello, I have a website having many subdomains having same copy of content i think its harming my SEO for that site since abc and xyz sub domains do have same contents. Thus i require to know i have already deleted required subdomain DNS RECORDS now how to have those pages removed from Google index as  well ? The DNS Records no more exists for those subdomains already.

              Technical SEO | | anand2010
              0
            • Hakkasan

              Google Off/On Tags

              I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?

              Technical SEO | | Hakkasan
              1

            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
            • Digital Marketers
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation 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.