John Mueller mentioned in a recent Google Office Hours that Google indexes images slowly, which could be a problem if you’re making large changes to thousands of images.
When asked what would help, Mueller said that many of the suggested solutions would be ineffective and that the only thing that would help get new images indexed was a quick server response.
Images that haven’t been updated in months haven’t been indexed
The person who asked the question used the example of updating 50,000 recipe images and the subsequent 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 went on to say that when you test in Search Console, it says there’s no problem because it sees the images when it looks for them. However, this does not imply that the newly updated image is indexed, as it is not.
Read Top 14 Reasons Google Isn’t Indexing Your Website.
As a result, the search console gives a false impression that everything is fine.
He expressed his dissatisfaction with the search console’s failure to indicate that the images have not yet been indexed.
He said:
“And while they’re being harvested, you don’t see anything. There’s no warning about that.
…What it means is, you better not make any changes or tweaks to slightly improve the formatting of your image URL because if you do, you disappear.”
Google is Slow to Re-Index Images
Mueller answered:
“Probably what is happening there is the general crawling and indexing of images, which is a lot slower than normal web pages.
And if you remove one image URL and you add a new one on a page, then it does take a lot of time to be picked up again.
And that’s probably what you’re seeing there.”
Old Images Should Be Redirected
Mueller then suggested that old image URLs be redirected to the new image URLs.
Mueller suggested:
“What we would recommend in a case like that is to redirect your old URLs to the new ones, also for the images.
So if you do something like you have an image URL which has the file size attached to the URL, for example, then that URL should redirect to a new one.
And in that case, it’s like we can keep the old one in our systems and we just follow the redirect to the new one.”
Image Sitemaps Won’t Help You Index Images Faster
The person who asked the question wanted to know if an image site map would help Google Images index new images faster.
Mueller responded:
“I don’t think so.
I think it could help us to understand which ones we need to pick up.
But we have to recrawl the web page anyway.
And the image would only drop out if we have recrawled the web page with a new image URL attached to it.
So it’s… I don’t think it would speed that up.
It would be more useful if you’re documenting the stable state.
Then that sitemap file with the image URLs would help.
But if you’re making a change by changing all the image URLs, I don’t think the sitemap file will change anything there.”
The documentation for Google’s Search Central Image Map makes few claims about how useful image sitemaps are.
The only thing it says about site maps is that they can help Google find images that have been hidden from it due to technical issues.
The following is taken from Google’s Image Sitemap Help page:
“Add images to an existing sitemap, or create a separate sitemap just for your images. Adding images to a sitemap helps Google discover images that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code).”
Mueller stated that a fast server response would be beneficial for indexing.
He said:
“And obviously, if it’s faster, it’s easier for us to request a lot of URLs.
Because otherwise we just get bogged down, because we send… fifty Googlebots to your site at one time and we’re waiting for responses before we can move forward.”
Updating Thousands of Images Can Have Negative Consequences
The main takeaway is that updating images can result in a drop in Google rankings for old images that haven’t been replaced, as it can take months for Google to index new pages.
To help speed up the indexing, John Mueller suggests using a fast server response and redirecting from the old image URLs to the new image URLs.
Learn more from SEO and read How to Make Gallery Page Images Google Search Friendly.
