Vision Forward: Tracing Image Search SEO From Its Roots To AI-Enhanced Horizons

@roxanastingu | March 2024 |
Vision forward
Tracing Image SEO from its roots
to AI-enhanced horizons
Roxana STINGU
Head of Search and SEO
@roxanastingu
Amsterdam 2024

Tech SEO
Search fanatic AI enthusiast
Intro

Image Search
02
01
Best practices
03 Generative AI
04 What the future holds

Image
Search
01

It all started with a green
dress…

New search facet for
Images

At first there were only
JPEGS

Images are everywhere

Images in Google Web Search
67%
64.5%
44%
43%
US
UK
US
UK
Data from SEMRush Sensor on March 10th, 2024

53%
48%
45%
33%
US
UK
US
UK
Data from SEMRush Sensor on May 2023

53%
48%
45%
33%
US
UK
US
UK
-2%
+30%
+26%
+34%
Change in 10 months

% of results with Images in Web Search
SEMRush Sensor data, US Desktop, March 10th, 2024

% growth by niche
SEMRush Sensor data, US Desktop, March 10th, 2024 Compared to May 2023

Best
Practices
02

INDEXING
DISCOVERY
CRAWLING RANKING

DISCOVERY

Image sitemaps
Required Deprecated
<?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>https://www.example.com/sample1.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>https://www.example.com/image1.jpg</image:loc>
<image:caption>Succinct sentence to describe the image</image:caption>
<image:geo_location>Amsterdam, Netherlands</image:geo_location>
<image:title>Image title</image:title>
<image:license>Image Archive License, Standard Use</image:license>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
DISCOVERY

HTML
<img src="image1.jpg" alt="Succinct visual description of the image" />
<img>
<div style="background-image:url(image1.jpg)">Succinct visual
description of the image</div>
<div>
DISCOVERY

<picture><source>
HTML: Responsive and image formats
<picture>
<source
srcset="image-small.png 320w, image-
medium.png 800w,
image-large.png 1200w"
sizes="(min-width: 60rem) 80vw,
(min-width: 40rem) 90vw, 100vw">
<img src="image-large.png" alt="Succinct
visual description of the image">
</picture>
DISCOVERY

Intersection observer
Lazy loading
Browser level
<img
src="image.png"
loading="lazy"
alt=”Succinct visual
description of the
image">
<img
class="lazy"
src="image.png"
data-src="image.png"
alt="Succinct visual
description of the
image">
DISCOVERY

DISCOVERY
CRAWLING

The basics of crawling
CRAWLER PROCESSING INDEX
HTML RENDERING
CRAWLING

In comes Googlebot-Image
CRAWLER PROCESSING INDEX
HTML RENDERING
CRAWLING
IMAGE
CRAWL
QUEUE
IMAGE
CRAWLER
IMAGES
Googlebot-Image/1.0

CDNs
CRAWLING

example.com
200
CDNs + Redirects
example.cdn1.com
INDEXED
CRAWLING

301
example.com
200
CDNs + Redirects
example.cdn1.com example.cdn2.com
INDEXED
CRAWLING
BLOCKED

example.com
301
301
CDNs + Redirects
example.cdn1.com
example.cdn2.com
INDEXED
CRAWLING
BLOCKED
200
images.example.com
INDEXED

Crawls by Filetype
HTML
IMAGE
CRAWLING

Expect delayed results in Image Search
WEB
SEARCH
IMAGE
SEARCH
CRAWLING

Canonicalisation
CRAWLING

No canonicalisation for images
CRAWLING

Advice still stands*
CRAWLING
*Last checked on January 15th, 2024

robots.txt
Blocking crawls to images
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /very-secret-images/
CRAWLING

INDEXING
DISCOVERY
CRAWLING

Indexable image formats
INDEXING
JPG PNG GIF BMP WEBP SVG
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
<img
src="data:image/svg+xml;base64,[data]">

Image retrieval patent

Textual information
INDEXING
THE INDEX
WEB DOCUMENT
Text around images
Alt attribute values
Image captions
Anchor texts
Metadata
File name

X-robots tag
Meta robots tag
header ("X-Robots-Tag:
noimageindex, nofollow", true);
Keeping images out of the index
INDEXING
<meta name="robots"
content="noimageindex,
nofollow">

The basics of ranking for images
RANKING
IMAGE WITHOUT PAGE
PAGE WITHOUT IMAGE
✓
✗

How images are ranked
Collection 1
Collection 2
THE INDEX
Collection 1
SEARCH TERM
RANKING

What can influence the order of images in a
collection
Collection 1
Relevancy
Location
Probability to navigate to an image
Size & quality
RANKING

File size
1200px wide
Image resolution
16x9, 4x3, and 1x1
Aspect ratio
123 kb
What is image size?
RANKING

Meta robots tag
Control image previews
RANKING
<meta name="robots" content="max-
image-preview:large">
Meta robots tag
<meta name="robots" content="max-
image-preview:none">

Does Google use EXIF?
RANKING
“The short answer is: [...] it is
something that Google is able to
parse out, and I think we do reserve
the right to use it in ranking.”
Matt Cutts
2014

RANKING
Matt Cutts
“This is still the same as
before.”
John Mueller
2014 2017

RANKING
Matt Cutts
“This is still the same as
before.”
John Mueller
“To tell Google about your image
metadata, add structured data or
IPTC photo metadata to each image
on your site.”
Google Search Central
Documentation - Image metadata
in Google Images
2014 2017 2024
IPTC - International Press Telecommunications Council

Image Rights Metadata
Credit line
Creator
Copyright notice
RANKING

license
acquireLicensePage
Licensable Badge
RANKING

RANKING
Structured data v. IPTC
Structured data
Page specific
Creates rich snippets for
your pages that are
ranking for a specific
image
IPTC metadata
Image specific
Creates rich snippets
whenever the image
shows up, no matter
which page is ranking

Web v. Image Search ranking
Web Search Image Search
RANKING

Best position to rank for in Web Search
Web Search
RANKING

Eye tracking study for Image Search
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15
An Eye-Tracking Study of User Behavior in Web Image Search
Wanxuan Lu and Yunde Jia Beijing Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology,
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
RANKING

Spikes in impressions?
RANKING

Search Console - Web Search data cheat sheet
Impressions Clicks Average Position
Same as Knowledge Panel
links, after blue links
Knowledge
Panel
Clicking takes you to Image
Search
Space it occupies
Image Pack
Clicking takes you to Image
Search
Space it occupies
Image
Carousel
Clicking opens the Image
Preview panel
Space it occupies
Image
Thumbnails
Clicking takes you to the
website
When Scrolled into view
Query Refinement
RANKING

Search Console Search Appearance
RANKING

Get creative
RANKING

Estimate what queries appear in image packs or
knowledge graphs
CASE
WHEN Query (Image Search)=Query (Web Search)
AND Average Position (Web Search) =1
AND Web Impressions > 100
AND Web Clicks < (Web Impressions/100)
THEN "Image Pack or Image Carousel"
WHEN Query (Image Search)=Query (Web Search)
AND Average Position (Web Search) >5
AND Web Impressions > 100
AND Web Clicks < (Web Impressions/100)
THEN "Knowledge Panel"
ELSE "Other"
END
RANKING

Are images worth the hassle?
Footlocker case-study on https://brodieclark.com/
Foot Locker Google image thumbnail organic traffic vs. competitors (Semrush index)
228% increase in
estimated organic visits
p/mo that now have
image thumbnails
The change?
Image dimensions
update from 67×67 to
200x200.

Generative
AI
03

Is AI used for ranking?
RankBrain Neural Matching BERT
MUM

Is AI used for ranking in Image Search?

Image features
Collection 1
Brightness
Colour
Edges
Intensity
Shape
Texture
Image Features
Similarity
Extracted using Wavelet based
techniques e.g. wavelet
transform

Image patents made easy
seobythesea.com
Bill
Slawski
jcchouinard.com
JC
Chouinard

Embeddings
Image embeddings are numerical representations of images that
capture their semantic meaning and visual features.

Embeddings

It’s all about balance
Image features
extraction algorithms
Image features
embedding
LLMs

Example from baume-referencement.com
Google can detect details in images

Yet this woman is seen as pizza
Image Search results for “pizza aux anchois” on Google.fr

Experiment from baume-referencement.com
The greatest experiment

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion in
the US for copyright infringement

Who owns the copyright?

Ethical foundation models

Will AI-generated images rank?

What the
future
holds
04

No one knows what the future holds

No, I can’t guess the lottery numbers

My ridiculous prediction

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Provenance
SynthID

Provenance

One solution to rule them all?

Thank you!

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