I was not at PubCon yesterday for Gary Illyes of Google’s keynote but I was watching the Twitter stream and to me, it seems his presentation was mostly focused around image search. This was not a surprise based on Google’s recent communication efforts around image search being important for SEOs to look at.
Based on what I saw, I didn’t see any new information but here are some of the tweets covering his talk:
How to do better on Google Images?
– Crawl: Make sure your not blocking in robots.txt
– Index: Use image XML sitemaps
– Rank: Optimise text around image, title and description of the page
– Bonus: Add structured data to get images badged / stand out@methode #pubcon pic.twitter.com/qpEbgfJ2sO— Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) March 6, 2019
“We don’t do image recognition on every image, even though we’d like to, so put descriptive text around your images” @methode #Google #Pubcon #Keynote pic.twitter.com/k4zw2g5c1M
— Simon Heseltine (@SimonHeseltine) March 6, 2019
Are you using JS to display images, such as lazy loading? It’s often not search friendly. G often just sees the placeholder pixels. G doesn’t scroll. They load up to 10K pixels in the height of the page and look at that. If lazy loaded, G may not see the images. @methode #pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 6, 2019
Q: Which is better for Google Images SEO?
A: one of left, use text to describe context of what the image is about @methode #pubcon pic.twitter.com/XTkTs80zjX
— Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) March 6, 2019
#seo tips for #Google images: use structured data and meta data for Google to index your images and serve useful results in SERPs #pubcon pic.twitter.com/9T4U9vkwUe
— Alphametic (@Alphametic) March 6, 2019
Step 1 for Google Images SEO, make sure your images are getting crawled!
Test a few of your URLs in the mobile-friendly test to see if Googlebot can access your pages! This includes image URLs you can find in the IMG tags “src” attribute @methode #pubcon pic.twitter.com/ZtSFVIRcJg
— Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) March 6, 2019
Once Google indexes an image, they identify what it is @methode #pubcon pic.twitter.com/N22oUPMCji
— Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo) March 6, 2019
People forget how much traffic Google Images can bring. @methode #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) March 6, 2019
Q: is EXIF data still relevant for image search?
A: Yes. It can help people find images with, for example, a specific license. But it doesn’t always work properly. Google’s engineers are working on this.@methode #pubcon— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 6, 2019
Sounds like EXIF isn’t used but it’s being looked at but IPTC is used for copyright reasons. @methode #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) March 6, 2019
We threw an unreasonable number of engineers at Google Images recently. @methode #Pubcon pic.twitter.com/jnKstfUNSU
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) March 6, 2019
Want to get images indexed? You must have an <img> tag in the HTML.@methode #pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 6, 2019
Google extracts metadata from images. For example, they may use the title tag of a page in image search, or structured data, or badges such as “recipe”.
These are extracted during indexing.@methode #pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 6, 2019
Renaming the image does have an impact but it’s minimal. Focus on the text around the image. @methode #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) March 6, 2019
That is just some of the coverage of his presentation – again, mostly but not all, image search focused.
Image credit to @Marie_Haynes.
Forum discussion at Twitter.