Google URL result image placement

Robert Crowther Jan 2023

Similar to providing images for social media using Open Graph tags, but difficult. Google process is more wary than the social media platforms, crawls less, and makes tighter demands.

Google advice

From Google Help (o n structural data),

For best results, provide multiple high‐resolution images (minimum of 50K pixels when multiplying width and height) with the following aspect ratios: 16x9, 4x3, and 1x1.

How to inform Google?

Google advises structured data in JSON‐LD format. Here is the example from Google’s help pages,

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  ...
  "image": [
    "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
    "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
  ]
}

However, many pages gain image displays without structured data. See the survey below.

If you are working with a Content Management System/website framework then plugins may be available to help. But, and you know, I can not recommend anything, or say if they will work. You will need to try.

A warning: Google uses many ways to decide

See this analysis of a Google patent. Google will decide to display an image based on subject searched for (‘travel’, likely yes, ‘metaphysics’, likely no) visit rates, if it feels the image was supplied with appropriate information, if the image is high quality …and likely more aspects. Much of this can not be influenced.

Image requirements

There is a tension here. Like the Open Graph requirements, Google statements say they prefer high resolution images. But I found that Open Graph crawling possibly prefers lower weight downloads. So you are needing some high level of resolution, but to reduce weight for deployment sanity, and maybe to encourage crawling also. For photos, that naturally means JPEG. I’ve found that mid‐level resolution images will not be recognised by Google.

Also, Google is more explicit than Open Graph about their preferred aspect ratios. Unfortunately, they say the plural ‘images’, not ‘image’. Open Graph is good at simply cropping to fit but, from their own advice, Google process is not so flexible. I’ll tell you if I find anything???

I searched for an ancient building (good subject to post images about), but not well‐known (less links). Which returned many image‐enhanced links. Near all the sites were built using web‐platforms. Most of the sites were slow‐loading with poor navigation, low user interest and poor image quality. But the images were photos and the platforms mean the websites had appropriate markup,

I then tried a search for a very famous old person. This brought up links from prestigious and/or well‐known sites. The quality of user‐experience was much higher,

Can we make any sense of this?

However, I know for sure that 400px, even 1024px width images may not be displayed.

The big question is not answered

What this has not done is answer an important question. If a site provides optimised images for a webpage, say 300px–600px width, Google will not like this. Will it pick a image optimised for thumbnail creation i.e high resolution and larger, if provided in meta‐data? When there is some proof that Google tends to ignore meta‐data? I’ll tell you if I find anything???

What should I do?

Provide a high quality image. If it is in HTML, add description data, ‘alt’ tags, and image sizes, even captions. If in the page, place it high, preferably first. In other words, give the Google process reason to believe in your image and ways to categorise it.

Structured data seems to have less effect than Google promotes. Open Graph seems to be read by Google, but the strength of effect …I do not know. I’ve found several examples of Google ignoring data. However, I found one example of Google reading meta‐data, so use it if you want low resolution for HTML display but high resolution for thumbnails—but I don’t know if that works???

Image type

Google process seems to prefer photos, though where it finds that information I don’t know (EXIF?). I recommend reducing image size anyway. Time for JPEG—I suspect that helps. Also, Google doesn’t seem to look much at the photos, some examples I’ve seen have been very poor quality.

Sizing

I can’t find any example I believe less than 640px wide. Google seems to be more stringent than Open Graph data, which allows down to about 300px (while recommending higher).

Given Google’s own statements I’d go for 16:9 aspect. Any more regular shape, like a square, will be cropped from this. As with Open Graph data, I prefer that to Google process guessing how to fill blank space. If you have the capability to produce images to size, then why not use Open Graph width at 16:9,

1200 × 675

The difference to Open Graph recommendations,

1200 × 630

is only 35px. If that doesn’t suit your framing, try 4:3,

1200 × 900

Refs

Brief general advice from Google,

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/175288?hl=en

More general advice,

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images

This page analyses a patent lodged by Google for image selection. The page is brief and full of coined‐names, but is information unavailable elsewhere,

https://www.jcchouinard.com/google-image-display-within-web-results/

Google advice on structured data markup for type ‘Article’,

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article