Deindexed from Google images Sep17th

[danta]

We have a travel website that has been ranked in Google for 12-14years. The site produces original images with branding on them and have been for years ranking well. There's been no site changes. We have a Moz spamscore 1/17 and Domain Authority 59.

Sep 17th all our images just disappeared from Google Image Search. Even searching for our domain with keyword photo results in nothing. I've checked our Search console and no email from Google and I see no postings on Moz and others relating to search algo changes with Images. I'm at a loss here.. does anyone have some advice?

[CleverPhD]

Bummer.  This smells of a technical change that occurred on your site.

Check: robots.txt - are you blocking access to images?   You can also look in Search Console and under Crawl use the Robots.txt tester and see if your image URLs fail there.  It will show you where the issue is.

Check things like all your images got moved to a CDN and no 301 redirects from the old image URLs were put in place.

Talk to your dev and look at every ticket prior to Sept 17th and see if there is anything else that was changed.

The good news is that if this is something technical and you fix it quickly, you should recover.

Good luck!

[anaxsys]

It may not just be you. I just noticed the same thing happened to my website on 9/7.

Google webmaster reported an average of 2500 clicks per day from image search for the last year, then on the 7th 0, and not a click since then.

I just now noticed because I do not check analytics very often. I have a question though, when Google changed image search they made it easier for a customer to click directly to the photo without loading the website or getting an impression. To circumvent this some websites would change htaccess to detect this, and overlay the graphic, or cause the direct link to redirect to the page with the photo on it. I had one of these redirects, and now I cannot find anyone on Google Image search with that overlay or redirect. You can tell when a site had it implemented because the original small resolution wouldn't enhance, it would stay pixilated, I assume because Google couldn't access it directly.

I will keep investigating. Thoughts?

---

For more information. Webmaster doesn't report any change in page index, or any other warnings. The script mentioned is a rewrite rule in htaccess that changes the url to point to the source page rather than the direct photo

[danta]

We were just advised of a manual action from using an anti-hotlinking tool. This is old code from years ago so they must be just implementing this guideline now.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?ctx=MAC

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hey Dan,

Glad I read to the end as I was about to suggest looking at this. A client of mine was also hit very recently with something similar and it was rogue code that was carried over from one version to another.

Glad all is sorted

-Andy

[CleverPhD]

Good luck with your recovery!

[anaxsys]

Yup,
That was the ticket Dan. Webmaster reports the same manual action for my site. 
It seems like a bit of a crack down on those that tried to avoid having users go straight to the photos hosted on a website. 
This is a difficult situation for me, not just for loosing countless number 1 image positions for great keywords, but because the point of my site is to offer free stock photos. If users can search for them and hit the full resolution without visiting my website, then its just a drain on bandwidth.

I have taken out the script that causes the URL rewrite, but considering Google image search brings 70% of my traffic, what would you guys suggest?

[anaxsys]

As a final follow up. We removed the script that redirected people from going directly to our photos from image search. Requested that the manual action be removed, and the day that they removed it ALL RANKINGS WERE RESTORED!

While while this doesn't resolve the fact that big G allows users to take advantage of our service without visiting our website, it is a huge relief to know we aren't starting from the ground up.

[danta]

Thanks for posting your follow up. We're still waiting to see restoration of our images and it's been 13 days.