One SEO professional asked John Mueller about updating image URLs in Google Search.
They have been really badly affected by constantly updating images in Google ImageSearch.
They run a recipe website, and they found that if they have lots of recipes indexed in the recipe gallery, and you change the format of your images, then as the metadata of the images is refreshed, you will get new metadata.
And this will screw up the display of your images. This can be a problem with around 50,000 recipes.
Additionally, it could be months before any of the new images could be picked up. And while these images are being harvested, you don’t see anything.
But, when you do a test on Google Search Console, it does this in real time and says “Yeah, everything’s correct, because the image is there.” And there is no warning about this.
What it means is, you better not make any changes or tweaks to improve the formatting of your image URL, because if you do, you disappear.
John explained that what is happening here is likely the general crawling and indexing of images.
Crawling and indexing of images, John said, is much slower than normal web pages. If you remove one image URL, and you add a new one on the page, then it takes a lot of time for the new image format to be picked up again.
This is probably what the SEO pro is seeing here. What John recommends in a case like this is to redirect their old image URl to the new ones for these images also.
If you do something like you have an image URL, which has the file size attached to the URL for example, then this URL should redirect to the new one.
And in this case, Google can keep the old one in their systems and follow the redirect to the new one without issue.
This happens at approximately the 50:48 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 7 50:48
My question is on the harvesting of images for the recipe gallery, because we’ve finally identified something which I think has affected some other bloggers. And it’s really badly affected us, which is that if you have lots of 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. And while they’re being harvested, you don’t see anything. But when you do a test on Google Search Console, it does it in real time and says yeah, everything’s right, because the image is there. So there’s no warning about that. And 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.
John 51:39
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. 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.
SEO Professional 7 52:21
To do that, I guess we have to still send the old one in the metadata. Because if we send fresh metadata, I believe you delete the old one, because our old image URLs still work. It’s just because we’ve shipped you the new metadata that you’re no longer going there. So I think we have to start sending the old URLs as well.
John 52:40
That might be easier to process. Yeah. Yeah.
SEO Professional 7 52:45
Okay, but it’s just yeah, it’s what the key thing is, there’s nothing on the thing work with the previewing and things which says, By the way, this won’t happen in the real world, or I mean, it’s sort of vaguely gives that caveat. But the fact that images can take so long to be picked up, and I guess you don’t see it on Google with the web page. These pages still show an image in the web page, because you still know “Oh, this image goes with this web page.” But it’s only the recipe metadata where it’s the other way around, where it’s looking for a particular image. Because otherwise, it just says we have an image which came from this web page. So a regular Google search result will just show any old image you know came from that webpage.
John 53:21
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the way that image search in general works in general. Yeah. But maybe we should have some kind of a better warning to catch those kinds of issues.
SEO Professional 7 53:33
If we had a sitemap for it specifically for images, will that be of any help in sort of speeding up the harvesting of images?
John 53:45
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 webpage anyway. And the image would only drop out if we have recrawled the webpage 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 like, if you’re documenting the stable state, then that Sitemap file with the image URLs would help? Yeah. But if you’re, you’re making a change by changing all the image URLs, I don’t think the sitemap file will change anything there.
SEO Professional 7 54:20
And the kind of crawl budget, essentially, there’s some algorithms going on deciding how much–how many robots to send where and you just have to live with however many it sends you?
John 54:31
Yeah, I, I mean, what you can do is make sure that your site is really fast in that regard. And that’s something in the crawl stats report, you should be able to see some of that, where you see the average response time. And I’ve seen sites that have around 50 milliseconds and other sites that have, like 600-700 milliseconds. And obviously, if it’s faster, it’s easier for us to request a lot of URLs because otherwise like we just get bogged down, because we send, I don’t know, 50 Googlebots your site at one time, and we’re kind of waiting for responses before we can move forward.
SEO Professional 7 55:06
Alright, so improving performance is probably helpful?
John 55:09
Yeah.
