In a recent Google Office Hours, John Mueller provided feedback on how slow Google is indexing images and what could become a problem if you make extensive changes to thousands of images.
When asked what helped, Mueller noted that many of the solutions asked did not work, and the only thing that would meaningfully help in getting new images indexed was a fast server response.
Updated images not indexed for months
The person who asked the question gave an example of updating 50,000 recipe images and how what happened next negatively affected the recipe site.
The man asked:
“If you index a lot of recipes in your recipe library and you change the format of your images, you might have 50,000 recipes that get new metadata as the metadata refreshes.
But there is a delay in actually getting the new image.
It can take months for these new images to be extracted. “
He went on to share that when you test in Search Console, Search Console reports that there are no issues because it sees images when it checks for images. But that doesn’t mean new and updated images are indexed, it’s not.
So the search console provides a false assurance that everything is fine.
He commented on how the search console cannot indicate that the image has not been indexed.
He said:
“When they are harvested, you see nothing. There is no warning.
…which means, you’d better not make any changes or tweaks to slightly improve the formatting of your image URLs, because if you do, you’ll be gone. “
Google is slow to reindex images
Mueller replied:
“What’s probably going on is general crawling and indexing of images, which is much slower than normal web pages.
Also, if you delete an image URL and add a new URL to the page, it does take a long time to be picked up again.
This is probably what you see there. “
Redirect old images
Mueller next suggested redirecting the old image URL to the new image URL.
Mueller recommends:
“In this case, we recommend redirecting your old URL to the new URL, which also works for images.
So, for example, if you have an image URL with the file size appended to the URL, the URL should redirect to a new URL.
In this case it’s as if we could keep the old system in ours and then we just follow the redirect to the new system. “
Image sitemaps don’t speed up image indexing
The asker asked if image sitemaps would speed up the Google Image indexing of new images.
Mueller responded:
“I do not think so.
I think it helps us understand which ones we need to choose.
But we have to recrawl the web anyway.
The images are lost only when we re-crawl the web page with the new image URL.
So it’s…I don’t think it’s going to speed things up.
It is more useful if you are recording steady state.
Then a sitemap file with image URLs would help.
However, I don’t think the sitemap file will change anything if you change it by changing all the image URLs. “
Google’s own Search Center Image Maps documentation doesn’t make much claims about the usefulness of image sitemaps.
The only thing it says about sitemaps is that they help Google discover images that are hidden from Google for technical reasons.
from Google 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 we might not be able to find (such as your website) images accessed using JavaScript code).”
Fast server responses help with indexing
What helped the indexing, Mueller said, was a fast server response.
He said:
“Obviously, if it’s faster, it’s easier for us to request a lot of URLs.
Because otherwise we’ll just be stuck because we’re sending your site… 50 Googlebots at a time, and we’re waiting for a response before we can move on. “
Updating thousands of images can backfire
The big takeaway is that updating images can cause Google to discard old images beyond replacement, as it can take Google months to index new pages.
John Mueller recommends fast server responses and using redirects from old image URLs to new image URLs to help speed up indexing.
Citation
Image indexing is slower than web indexing
Watch the 50:47 minute mark
