Google’s web search algorithm is unconcerned about what’s in an image. It doesn’t matter if it’s not marked up with the correct structured data.
Whether it’s an award-winning photograph or a blank square, the SEO value it adds to the page is the same.
This is covered in the Search Central SEO hangout with Google’s John Mueller, which was recorded on October 22.
Andrew Sychev, the owner of a website, joins the Q&A to ask Mueller about using placeholder images in conjunction with lazy loading.
Sychev’s website is configured to display images further down a page as grey squares until a visitor begins scrolling.
When a visitor gets closer to the image on the page, the grey square is replaced by an actual photo.
This is done to improve page speed and to prevent a page from shifting around in a visitor’s browser, which can occur when a large number of images are loaded at once.
Sychev wonders if there’s any harm in using this setup because Googlebot doesn’t interact with web pages and thus won’t see the images.
While this question is about using lazy loading to improve cumulative layout shift (CLS), Mueller’s answer applies to SEO in general.
Would using your own photos improve a page’s SEO value more than using generic stock images?
Can Google tell if an image contains useful data, such as a chart or infographic?
All of these are common questions about images and web search—and here’s the answer.
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Google’s John Mueller Discusses Images and Web Search
Google doesn’t care what’s in your photos because it only applies to web searches, not image searches.
Google is only interested in signals like structured data and alt text.
That is important for web search because it can help Google better understand the page.
“I don’t think we care, to be quite honest. I don’t think for web search we look at the specific images on the page and say oh this is a nice image and this is a boring image.
We basically use those images in image search and that’s where we care what the content of the images care. But within web search we don’t really care if it’s a gray square or if it’s a picture of a beach.”
To answer the original question, using images instead of grey squares in a lazy loading setup is perfectly fine.
Mueller emphasizes that structured data communicates all of the information required by Google.
“It sounds okay. I think for the core web vital side, the CLS side, that’s something you can test where you try it in one way or the other way. With regards to indexing what is important is that we have information about the images on those pages.
So what you can do if you’re not sure if your lazy loading is recognized by Google is use the image structured data. On the pages themselves, give us the structured data for those images and then we can definitely pick that up.”
Keep in mind that this information only applies to Google’s web search algorithm. The Google Images algorithm considers what is in an image.
More importantly, it is important to visitors.
While Google may not be interested in the time and effort you put into creating the perfect graphic for a piece of content, your visitors will be.
Images can have an impact on how a person feels after viewing a piece of content. If the images made a difference in how much they enjoyed it, they’re likely to return.
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