Missing Google Search Image Thumbnails

Over the past few months, generally around the September Useful Content Update and the various core updates we've done over the past few months, there have been complaints about image thumbnails on some sites. not appearing in Google search results lists. Google responded to the issue again, saying it was not a technical issue for most sites, but rather a quality issue.

The truth is that this is a similar message to the one we saw when Google locked the thread regarding the disappearance of image thumbnails.

Google's John Mueller posted on LinkedIn saying: “Unfortunately, the cases reported to me are not due to technical issues (as far as we can tell while debugging), neither on Google's side nor on the website.” “There is no technical solution, we would not consider it broken,” he added.

John said the problem was with the quality of the sites and that Google did not judge the quality of these sites high enough to display these image thumbnails. John wrote: “Currently, with major updates, our systems are re-evaluating websites, including whether or not to display thumbnails in various places in search.”

Where does this leave these site owners? John said he was “sorry I don't have better news to share.” “We can't make any promises about the future, but I imagine this will change over time, both as core updates re-evaluate the web and as we work on associated systems, such than these vignettes,” he wrote. So you have to wait for a new core update.

Then John said here's what site owners can do in the meantime, he wrote:

What can you do as a site owner in the meantime? With major updates, it makes sense to improve the site as a whole (and I realize many of you are already doing this, which is great). Structured data for appropriate rich result types can also make sense.

And of course, before spending too much time on more complex approaches, check that there are no technical issues after all (robots.txt, broken links, bot protection, etc.).

Images may appear on some Google Search surfaces and not others. This example was posted in this thread, asking why it sometimes shows up. John Mueller replied: “Yes, the tiles are displayed in different places and they have their own decision mechanisms.”

You can see a new thread here containing recent complaints regarding the issue.

As a reminder, in recent years we have covered voice and visual complaints about Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that typically have image thumbnails. image attached to the search result snippet. In May, Google responded to the large Google Webmaster Help thread in the forums saying we know, are still investigating, following our guidelines, and then locked the thread.

When this happened, Google Community Manager Ryan T wrote: “We continue to encourage you to follow our quality guidelines and rate your sites based on our documentation, as these practices can impact significant on how your sites are perceived by our systems.”

Which implied to me that these problems were not technical problems related to Google or the sites but rather to the quality of the site. I asked at the time: “Was this part of some kind of useful content released?”

Looks like this was part of a core update (which took over the useful content update).

Forum discussion on LinkedIn.