Our site is dependant on the Google Image Search, although we created an image sitemap and all images are submitted, no image is indexed still. At first we thought the issue was with the background-images (no support for object-fit) we use entirely to embed our images, even for important ones that are content-relevant. The then submitted image-sitemap did not help very much (look at our search console screenshot).
The next things I would have tried would be to exclude our images from the Webflow Assets and to embed them on an own CDN/private webserver because maybe the Webflow Assets gained some sort of bad reputation or the obfuscated image names get somehow punished. The problem is, we cannot include external images with tags on Webflow.
Our main concern is that it takes just too long to show our images up on Google (search for brandengates select), even we have this site for at least an half year. Even if we had images of much higher quality or much more beautiful ones, it wouldn’t result in any benefit without the search results on the images tab.
Thank you for any help you can offer,
Calvin R.
Branden Gates Studios
I have the same question actually. I wonder if @brandengates or anyone else has figured this out? Webflow’s autogenerated sitemap doesn’t include images, which is already unhelpful.
There’s very little help when it comes to image SEO! Anyone making a portfolio or image-based website relies very heavily on image indexing. I’ve tried making my own sitemap that included images, but no amount of tweaking changes anything
The first thing I see is that all images you have are divs with background. I think Google can’t really index those properly. From what I know from Google’s point of view Images that are background are part of the design and images that use the tag are part of the content.
Change your images with the actual Image element.
Here’s something useful:
When to use <img />
When Your Image needs to be indexed by search engine
If it has a relation to content not to design.
If your image is not too small ( not iconic images ).
Images where you can add alt and title attribute.
When to use CSS background-image
Images Purely Used to Design.
No Relation With Content.
Small Images which we can play with CSS3.
Repeating Images ( In blog author icon , date icon will be repeated for each article etc.,).
Based on the list above and some observations we have these reasons to use an img tag:
A logo image has semantic meaning and has relation to the content. So this is just the right thing to do from a semantical point of view.
Google does not automatically index background images, otherwise the image search results would be filled with image sprites. Google hasn’t officially made a statement about this but it will most likely add more value to the div with an aria label, although an image will most likely still have more value. (Bing supposedly doesn’t do anything with this though)
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