Google On Product Images For Web Snippets

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is a way to better control the images that Google shows in the web search results for product results. The answer is not really, there is no schema or structured data that helps you control or define these for Google, John said. He said Google just decides on its own if it wants to show them for snippets or not.

We have seen product images in the web results for a long time, sometimes more often than not. Here is an example for a query on [sofas]:

John did add that maybe Google will add a help document about these snippets so this is clearer for the community.

This came up at the 10:54 mark when this question came in:

Question:

I’m trying to find out some more information about the images I recently see increasingly in the organic search results directly in search, not in image tab because there’s no documentation in Google, in the Search Central. And I try to find out some common things about images of some differences butIi don’t see anything connected to the resolution or size or the ranking position. So is this just a test or will there be coming documentation? Do you have any information about these image snippets?

Answer:

From our side these are essentially just a kind of snippet so it’s not based on any particular markup that you’re doing on the pages. It’s not something specific that you define on the pages. It’s really just we recognize these images are on these pages and for whatever reason our algorithms think that for users showing some images or kind of the these snippet images would help them to decide which of the results to click on. So that’s from our side it’s something like, yes we are showing images and snippets and I think in the past we didn’t do that so much but it’s not based on anything specific that you can control other than like maybe deciding you don’t want any images on these pages indexed and you want to use like the what is it no image index meta tag. But it’s not something where you can say I want these images indexed or these images shown in the snippet it’s essentially we’re picking images from the page.

Maybe should we should at least document that we do show images in the snippet and that it’s not something that you can easily control. That’s a good point.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.