Google Images search traffic and image thumbnail issues

[dqmedia]

Hi MOZ community!

Need a little help with a strange issue we are seeing of late on our project CareerAddict.com.

We have seen a sudden and significant drop in image visibility in Search Console from the 27th August onwards. I understand that Google has been updating their filters and other bits in image search, so maybe this could have impacted us?

I also noticed that the images which are mapped to our articles are not the full featured article 700px wide images which we provide to Google in the Structured Data. They are instead taking the OG share 450px wide images now on many occasions. You can see this by searching for "careeraddict.com" in images.

Any insight or suggestions welcome on both of these. Interested to understand if any other webmasters are experiencing other or similar problems with image visibility in Google also.

Thanks!

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi,

I noticed you have your own CDN like domain on dq1.me which has multiple sub-domains. On some of the articles I looked at there were images being used on the page being pulled in from various sub-domains of the dq1.me domain. Furthermore, some of your tags such as og:image were using the same images but on the primary www.careeraddict.com domain.

I'd suggest you try to sort this confusion out, and have a canonical image URL that is used everywhere across the site. I imagine there are many confusing signals for Google with there being 2-4 URLs per image which are potentially all being used in different places.

Good luck!

-Tom

[dqmedia]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your response on this.

I have seen several credible websites state that canonical image URLs are not used by Google and should not be used, even on MOZ I have read this too I believe. Interested to know your source on this?

The use of our own self-hosted cdn to load images using multiple connections is following Google's image best practices - this is recommended across the web too. So not sure what the problem is you are highlighting there? The only thing that was a concern was the fact we are using a different domain entire, not the deployment of the self-hosted cdn.

The og:image and structured data image are using the primary domain, and again, that is following best practices.

Thanks