A website I maintain has articles appearing on the Google News home page pretty regularly. Whenever it does, it never has the story’s lead image along with it. Several days later the image might be attached, but even that’s probably less than 25% of the time.
I’ve read that an image will only be attached if it’s in the images index, however the subject of image SEO appears to be a bit vague - unlike text indexing, I suspect there’s a good deal of guesswork going on.
Anyway, I’ve poked and prodded various parameters purported to help increase image ranking and hopefully the speed image will be committed to the index; alt & title attributes, image pixel sizes, placing images toward the top of the page and contextually alongside the related story, using descriptive image filenames and, most recently, including the image in the news sitemap. So far I’ve seen no noticeable increase.
I’m like a dog with a bone on this one. I can keep poking around and waiting a few weeks to see what floats to the top, but I’d love to know if anybody offer some real, anecdotal evidence as to that makes Google love your images?
Oh, and does anyone know if da Goog prefers old school HTML “width” & “height” attributes or is it down with the “style” attribute?
The only valid reason for specifying the dimensions of an image is so that the browser can lay out the page correctly when the image is not (yet) available. So if images are turned off or the image can’t be downloaded for some reason, the layout will be preserved; if the image is just taking a little while to download, the page can be set out and then the picture slotted in seamlessly without needing to rejig the page to make space for it.
Given that, it makes sense to specify the dimensions in the HTML, because then you can guarantee they will be picked up when the page loads, whereas if they are in a separate CSS file, that might not load any quicker than the image itself, so you haven’t helped.
That said, I would be amazed if the Big G cares about the dimensions of your image (given that they don’t necessarily relate to the intrinsic size of the image (although of course they should)). Why would it? Alt text, yes. Title, yes. Meaningful filename, yes. Context and reference, yes. But why would dimensions have any effect?
I’d read on several SEO sites that images that included the dimensions may be committed to the index faster, and given recent rumblings around Google boosting rankings for sites that respond faster I figured there may be some validity to this.
As for the used of CSS for sizing - I’m talking about the use of the “style” attribute. The site’s is chock full of images with a variety of aspect ratios, so using external CSS isn’t feasible.
Thansk for the input . I’ll continue checking that all templates are populating the alt & title attributes, and also renaming the files appropriately.