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Google uses content previews, including text snippets and other media, to help people decide whether a result is relevant to their query. The type of preview shown depends on many factors, including the type of content a person is looking for and the kind of device they're viewing it on.

For instance, if you look for recipe results on Google, you may see thumbnail images and user ratings--things that may be more helpful than text snippets when it comes to deciding what you want to eat. Alternately, or perhaps you're looking for a concert nearby, and are able to check out the events directly in the search results. These are made possible by publishers marking up their pages with structured data.

Google automatically generates previews in a way intended to help a user understand why the results shown are relevant to their search and why the user would want to visit the linked pages. However, we recognize that site owners may wish to independently adjust the extent of their preview content in search results. To make it easier for individual websites to define how much or which text should be available for snippeting and the extent to which other media should be included in their previews, we're now introducing several new settings for webmasters. 

Letting Google know about your snippet and content preview preferences

Previously, it was only possible to allow a textual snippet or to not allow one. We're now introducing a set of methods that allow more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages. This is done through two types of new settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. 

Using robots meta tags

The robots meta tag is added to an HTML page's <head>, or specified via the x-robots-tag HTTP header. The robots meta tags addressing the preview content for a page are:

  • "nosnippet"
    This is an existing option to specify that you don't want any textual snippet shown for this page. 
  • "max-snippet:[number]"
    New! Specify a maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet for your page.
  • "max-video-preview:[number]"
    New! Specify a maximum duration in seconds of an animated video preview.
  • "max-image-preview:[setting]"
    New! Specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either "none", "standard", or "large".

They can be combined, for example:

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:50, max-image-preview:large">

Preview settings from these meta tags will become effective in mid-to-late October 2019 and may take about a week for the global rollout to complete.

Using the new data-nosnippet HTML attribute

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the "data-nosnippet" HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements. With this, you can prevent that part of an HTML page from being shown within the textual snippet on the page.

For example:

<p><span data-nosnippet>Harry Houdini</span> is undoubtedly the most famous magician ever to live.</p>

The data-nosnippet HTML attribute will be start affecting presentation on Google products later this year. Learn more in our developer documentation for the robots meta tag, x-robots-tag, and data-nosnippet.

A note about rich results and featured snippets

Content in structured data is eligible for display as rich results in search. These kinds of results do not conform to limits declared in the above meta robots settings, but rather, can be addressed with much greater specificity by limiting or modifying the content provided in the structured data itself. For example, if a recipe is included in structured data, the contents of that structured data may be presented in a recipe carousel in the search results. Similarly, if an event is marked up with structured data, it may be presented as such in the search results. To limit that presentation, a publisher can limit the amount and type of content in the structured data. 

Some special features on Search depend on the availability of preview content, so limiting your previews may prevent your content from appearing in these areas. Featured snippets, for example, requires a certain minimum number of characters to be displayed. This can vary by language, which is why there is no exact max-snippets length we can provide to ensure appearing in this feature. Those who do not wish to have content appear as featured snippets can experiment with lower max-snippet lengths. Those who want a guaranteed way to opt-out of featured snippets should use nosnippet.

The AMP Format

The AMP format comes with certain benefits, including eligibility for more prominent presentation of thumbnail images in search results and in the Google Discover feed. These characteristics have been shown to drive more traffic to publishers’ articles. However, publishers who do not want Google to use larger thumbnail images when their AMP pages are presented in search and Discover can use the above meta robots settings to specify max-image-preview of “standard” or “none.”

These new options are available to content owners worldwide and will operate the same for results we display globally. We hope they make it easier for you to optimize the value you get from Search and achieve your business goals. For more information, check out our developer documentation on meta tags. Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, or drop by our webmaster help forums.


Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland
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Google Images has made a series of changes to help people explore, learn and do more through visual search. An important element of visual search is the ability for users to scan many ideas before coming to a decision, whether it’s purchasing a product, learning more about a stylish room, or finding instructions for a DIY project. Often this involves loading many web pages, which can slow down a search considerably and prevent users from completing a task. 

As previewed at Google I/O, we’re launching a new AMP-powered feature in Google Images on the mobile web, Swipe to Visit, which makes it faster and easier for users to browse and visit web pages. After a Google Images user selects an image to view on a mobile device, they will get a preview of the website header, which can be easily swiped up to load the web page instantly. 

Swipe to Visit uses AMP's prerender capability to show a preview of the page displayed at the bottom of the screen. When a user swipes up on the preview, the web page is displayed instantly and the publisher receives a pageview. The speed and ease of this experience makes it more likely for users to visit a publisher's site, while still allowing users to continue their browsing session.

Publishers who support AMP don’t need to take any additional action for their sites to appear in Swipe to Visit on Google Images. Publishers who don’t support AMP can learn more about getting started with AMP here. In the coming weeks, publishers can also view their traffic data from AMP in Google Images in a Search Console’s performance report for Google Images in a new search area named “AMP on Image result”.

We look forward to continuing to support the Google Images ecosystem with features that help users and publishers alike.


Posted by Assaf Broitman, Google Images PM
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It's been two years since we started working on "mobile-first indexing" - crawling the web with smartphone Googlebot, similar to how most users access it. We've seen websites across the world embrace the mobile web, making fantastic websites that work on all kinds of devices. There's still a lot to do, but today, we're happy to announce that we now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.

Checking for mobile-first indexing

In general, we move sites to mobile-first indexing when our tests assure us that they're ready. When we move sites over, we notify the site owner through a message in Search Console. It's possible to confirm this by checking the server logs, where a majority of the requests should be from Googlebot Smartphone. Even easier, the URL inspection tool allows a site owner to check how a URL from the site (it's usually enough to check the homepage) was last crawled and indexed.

If your site uses responsive design techniques, you should be all set! For sites that aren't using responsive web design, we've seen two kinds of issues come up more frequently in our evaluations:

Missing structured data on mobile pages

Structured data is very helpful to better understand the content on your pages, and allows us to highlight your pages in fancy ways in the search results. If you use structured data on the desktop versions of your pages, you should have the same structured data on the mobile versions of the pages. This is important because with mobile-first indexing, we'll only use the mobile version of your page for indexing, and will otherwise miss the structured data.

Testing your pages in this regard can be tricky. We suggest testing for structured data in general, and then comparing that to the mobile version of the page. For the mobile version, check the source code when you simulate a mobile device, or use the HTML generated with the mobile-friendly testing tool. Note that a page does not need to be mobile-friendly in order to be considered for mobile-first indexing.

Missing alt-text for images on mobile pages

The value of alt-attributes on images ("alt-text") is a great way to describe images to users with screen-readers (which are used on mobile too!), and to search engine crawlers. Without alt-text for images, it's a lot harder for Google Images to understand the context of images that you use on your pages.

Check "img" tags in the source code of the mobile version for representative pages of your website. As above, the source of the mobile version can be seen by either using the browser to simulate a mobile device, or by using the Mobile-Friendly test to check the Googlebot rendered version. Search the source code for "img" tags, and double-check that your page is providing appropriate alt-attributes for any that you want to have findable in Google Images.

For example, that might look like this:

With alt-text (good!):
<img src="cute-puppies.png" alt="A photo of cute puppies on a blanket">

Without alt-text:
<img src="sad-puppies.png">

It's fantastic to see so many great websites that work well on mobile! We're looking forward to being able to index more and more of the web using mobile-first indexing, helping more users to search the web in the same way that they access it: with a smartphone. We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate this change carefully. If you have any questions, please drop by our Webmaster forums or our public events.


Posted by John Mueller, wearer of many socks, Google Switzerland
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UPDATE: After testing and further consideration, we have determined that the best place to measure query and click traffic from Google Images is in the Search Console Performance Report. Accordingly, we will continue to use https://www.google.com (or the appropriate ccTLD) as the referrer URL for all traffic from Google Images, and will not be providing a Google Images specific referrer URL (images.google.com).

Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Google Images to visually discover and explore content on the web. Whether it be finding ideas for your next baking project, or visual instructions on how to fix a flat tire, exploring image results can sometimes be much more helpful than exploring text.

Updating the referral source

For webmasters, it hasn't always been easy to understand the role Google Images plays in driving site traffic. To address this, we will roll out a new referrer URL specific to Google Images over the next few months. The referrer URL is part of the HTTP header, and indicates the last page the user was on and clicked to visit the destination webpage.
If you create software to track or analyze website traffic, we want you to be prepared for this change. Make sure that you are ingesting the new referer URL, and attribute the traffic to Google Images. The new referer URL is: https://images.google.com.
If you use Google Analytics to track site data, the new referral URL will be automatically ingested and traffic will be attributed to Google Images appropriately. Just to be clear, this change will not affect Search Console. Webmasters will continue to receive an aggregate list of top search queries that drive traffic to their site.

How this affects country-specific queries

The new referer URL has the same country code top level domain (ccTLD) as the URL used for searching on Google Images. In practice, this means that most visitors worldwide come from images.google.com. That's because last year, we made a change so that google.com became the default choice for searchers worldwide. However, some users may still choose to go directly to a country specific service, such as google.co.uk for the UK. For this use case, the referer uses that country TLD (for example, images.google.co.uk).
We hope this change will foster a healthy visual content ecosystem. If you're interested in learning how to optimize your pages for Google Images, please refer to the Google Image Publishing Guidelines. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through the Webmaster Tools Help Forum.
Posted by Ashutosh Agarwal, Product Manager, Google Images
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When you want to bake cupcakes, but you don't know what kind, Image Search can help you make a decision. Finding an image with a recipe can be challenging: you might end up on a page that has only pictures of these delicious things, or a cupcake fan site that doesn't have recipes, but everything else about them.
To help users find exactly what they want, Image Search on mobile devices now includes relevant badges on the thumbnails. Currently we have badges for recipes, videos, products, and animated images (GIFs).

If you have images on your site, you can help users identify the type of content associated with the image by using appropriate structured data on your pages. This helps users find relevant content quickly, and sends better targeted traffic to your site.
If you're publishing recipes, add Recipe markup on your page, for products, add Product markup, and for videos, add Video markup. Our algorithms will automatically badge GIFs, without the need of any markup. While we can't guarantee that badges will always be shown, adding the recommended structured data fields in addition to the required fields may increase the chance of adding a badge to your image search results.
You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that your pages are free of errors, and therefore eligible for the new Image Search badges. In addition, the Rich Cards report in Search Console can provide aggregate stats on your markup.
If you have questions about the feature, please ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Assaf Broitman, Image Search team
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Image Search recently launched “Similar items” on mobile web and the Android Search app. The “Similar items” feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire them on Google Image Search. Using machine vision technology, the Similar items feature identifies products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user. Similar items supports handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home & garden categories in the next few months.

The Similar items feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and find product info about items they’re interested in. Try it out by opening results from queries like [designer handbags].

Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from our users. The Similar items carousel gets millions of impressions and clicks daily from all over the world.

To make your products eligible for Similar items, make sure to add and maintain schema.org product metadata on your pages. The schema.org/Product markup helps Google find product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of product info.

To ensure that your products are eligible to appear in Similar items:

  • Ensure that the product offerings on your pages have schema.org product markup, including an image reference. Products with name, image, price & currency, and availability meta-data on their host page are eligible for Similar items
  • Test your pages with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly
  • See your images on image search by issuing the query “site:yourdomain.com.” For results with valid product markup, you may see product information appear once you tap on the images from your site. It can take up to a week for Googlebot to recrawl your website.

Right now, Similar items is available on mobile browsers and the Android Google Search App globally, and we plan to expand to more platforms in 2017.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter, or on Google+. To prevent your images from showing in Similar items, webmasters can opt-out of Google Image Search.

We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!

Posted by Julia E, Product Manager on Image Search
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Webmaster level: all

People looking for images on Google often want to browse through many images, looking both at the images and their metadata (detailed information about the images). Based on feedback from both users and webmasters, we redesigned Google Images to provide a better search experience. In the next few days, you’ll see image results displayed in an inline panel so it’s faster, more beautiful, and more reliable. You will be able to quickly flip through a set of images by using the keyboard. If you want to go back to browsing other search results, just scroll down and pick up right where you left off.

Screenshot of new Google Images results using the query nasa earth as an example


Here’s what it means for webmasters:
  • We now display detailed information about the image (the metadata) right underneath the image in the search results, instead of redirecting users to a separate landing page.
  • We’re featuring some key information much more prominently next to the image: the title of the page hosting the image, the domain name it comes from, and the image size.
  • The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.
  • The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view. This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.
As always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forum if you have questions.

Posted by Hongyi Li, Associate Product Manager
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Webmaster level: All

Creativity is an important aspect of our lives and can enrich nearly everything we do. Say I'd like to make my teammate a cup of cool-looking coffee, but my creative batteries are empty; this would be (and is!) one of the many times when I look for inspiration on Google Images.


The images you see in our search results come from publishers of all sizes — bloggers, media outlets, stock photo sites — who have embedded these images in their HTML pages. Google can index image types formatted as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and WebP, as well as SVG.

But how does Google know that the images are about coffee and not about tea? When our algorithms index images, they look at the textual content on the page the image was found on to learn more about the image. We also look at the page's title and its body; we might also learn more from the image’s filename, anchor text that points to it, and its "alt text;" we may use computer vision to learn more about the image and may also use the caption provided in the Image Sitemap if that text also exists on the page.

 To help us index your images, make sure that:
  • we can crawl both the HTML page the image is embedded in, and the image itself;
  • the image is in one of our supported formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG.
Additionally, we recommend:
  • that the image filename is related to the image’s content;
  • that the alt attribute of the image describes the image in a human-friendly way;
  • and finally, it also helps if the HTML page’s textual contents as well as the text near the image are related to the image.
Now some answers to questions we’ve seen many times:

 Q: Why do I sometimes see Googlebot crawling my images, rather than Googlebot-Image?
A: Generally this happens when it’s not clear that a URL will lead to an image, so we crawl the URL with Googlebot first. If we find the URL leads to an image, we’ll usually revisit with Googlebot-Image. Because of this, it’s generally a good idea to allow crawling of your images and pages by both Googlebot and Googlebot-Image.

Q: Is it true that there’s a maximum file size for the images?
A: We’re happy to index images of any size; there’s no file size restriction.

Q: What happens to the EXIF, XMP and other metadata my images contain?
A: We may use any information we find to help our users find what they’re looking for more easily. Additionally, information like EXIF data may be displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the interstitial page that appears when you click on an image.

 Q: Should I really submit an Image Sitemap? What are the benefits?
A: Yes! Image Sitemaps help us learn about your new images and may also help us learn what the images are about.

 Q: I’m using a CDN to host my images; how can I still use an Image Sitemap?
A: Cross-domain restrictions apply only to the Sitemaps’ tag. In Image Sitemaps, the tag is allowed to point to a URL on another domain, so using a CDN for your images is fine. We also encourage you to verify the CDN’s domain name in Webmaster Tools so that we can inform you of any crawl errors that we might find.

 Q: Is it a problem if my images can be found on multiple domains or subdomains I own — for example, CDNs or related sites?
A: Generally, the best practice is to have only one copy of any type of content. If you’re duplicating your images across multiple hostnames, our algorithms may pick one copy as the canonical copy of the image, which may not be your preferred version. This can also lead to slower crawling and indexing of your images.

 Q: We sometimes see the original source of an image ranked lower than other sources; why is this?
A: Keep in mind that we use the textual content of a page when determining the context of an image. For example, if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text, it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search. If you feel you've identified very bad search results for a particular query, feel free to use the feedback link below the search results or to share your example in our Webmaster Help Forum.

SafeSearch

Our algorithms use a great variety of signals to decide whether an image — or a whole page, if we’re talking about Web Search — should be filtered from the results when the user’s SafeSearch filter is turned on. In the case of images some of these signals are generated using computer vision, but the SafeSearch algorithms also look at simpler things such as where the image was used previously and the context in which the image was used.
One of the strongest signals, however, is self-marked adult pages. We recommend that webmasters who publish adult content mark up their pages with one of the following meta tags: 
<meta name="rating" content="adult" />
<meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
Many users prefer not to have adult content included in their search results (especially if kids use the same computer). When a webmaster provides one of these meta tags, it helps to provide a better user experience because users don't see results which they don't want to or expect to see. 

As with all algorithms, sometimes it may happen that SafeSearch filters content inadvertently. If you think your images or pages are mistakenly being filtered by SafeSearch, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum. 

If you need more information about how we index images, please check out the section of our Help Center dedicated to images, read our SEO Starter Guide which contains lots of useful information, and if you have more questions please post them in the Webmaster Help Forum. 

Written by , Webmaster Trends Analyst
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Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.

Posted by Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers
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Webmaster Level: All

Sitemaps are an invaluable resource for search engines. They can highlight the important content on a site and allow crawlers to quickly discover it. Images are an important element of many sites and search engines could equally benefit from knowing which images you consider important. This is particularly true for images that are only accessible via JavaScript forms, or for pages that contain many images but only some of which are integral to the page content.

Now you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide Google with exactly this information. For each URL you list in your Sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap, you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

Adding images to your Sitemaps is easy. Simply follow the instructions in the Webmaster Tools Help Center or refer to the example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
   xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
    <image:image>
        <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>

We index billions of images and see hundreds of millions of image-related queries each day. To take advantage of that traffic most effectively, take a moment to update your Sitemap file with information on the images from your site. Let us know in the Sitemaps forum if you have any questions.

Posted by Alkis Evlogimenos, Software Engineer
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Webmaster Level: All

What's our take on watermarked images for Image Search? It's a complicated topic. I talked with Peter Linsley—my friend at the 'plex, video star, and Product Manager for Image Search—to hear his thoughts.

Maile: So, Peter... "watermarked images". Can you break it down for us?
Peter: It's understandable that webmasters find watermarking images beneficial.
Pros of watermarked images
  • Photographers can claim credit/be recognized for their art.
  • Unknown usage of the image is deterred.
If search traffic is important to a webmaster, then he/she may also want to consider some of our findings:
Findings relevant to watermarked images
  • Users prefer large, high-quality images (high-resolution, in-focus).
  • Users are more likely to click on quality thumbnails in search results. Quality pictures (again, high-res and in-focus) often look better at thumbnail size.
  • Distracting features such as loud watermarks, text over the image, and borders are likely to make the image look cluttered when reduced to thumbnail size.
In summary, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, then searchers may select it less often. Preview your images at thumbnail size to get an idea of how the user might perceive it.
Maile: Ahh, I see: Webmasters concerned with search traffic likely want to balance the positives of watermarking with the preferences of their users -- keeping in mind that sites that use clean images without distracting artifacts tend to be more popular, and that this can also impact rankings. Will Google rank an image differently just because it's watermarked?
Peter: Nope. The presence of a watermark doesn't itself cause an image to be ranked higher or lower.

Do you have questions or opinions on the topic? Let's chat in the webmaster forum.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
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Webmaster Level: All

We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.



If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Peter Linsley, Product Manager
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