Plugin Support
Suwash
(@suascat_wp)
HI @geoffrey25,
As we checked this given article via Data Structured Testing tool we do see the presence of PrimaryImageOfPage schema outputted the relevant image. Yoast SEO automatically selects the featured image or fallback to the image from the content to set it in the schema markup that Google uses to show it in the search results.
Please note that, while our plugins output the necessary schema data on the page specifying the featured image as the primary image of the page, Google will still scan your pages for images and select their images using their algorithms.
Furthermore, please note that it’s entirely up to Google to decide what to show in the search results. Apart from the schema markup for the primary image, there are other factors (i.e. authority, context, etc.) that Google may take into account to decide whether or not to display an image next to your pages. As our plugin is generating the schema markup as expected, we recommend contacting Google for further assistance by making a post on their forum here https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters. They should be able to provide you with additional information as to how to get image thumbnails in the search results.
Hi Suwash,
Thank you for your reply. Ok I’m posting the same question on Google Webmaster forum as well as per your recommendation.
This is the question thread.
And I have a question. If I try to inspect this https://dailyspin.id/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/genshin-impact-graphic-quality.jpeg on Google Search Console. I’m getting this kind of error:
Crawl Allowed? No: blocked by robots.txt.
I’m not sure whether it might be the culprit but I don’t see anything suspicious with my robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Disallow: /?read-it-later
I’m not sure whether URL media attachment has to be crawled & indexed by Google in order to have it be displayed on Google’s search result or NOT.
Please enlighten. Thank you.
We see that you have inspected the image https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment/message-76224785-11503515099775909965.png on Google search console and Google search console is showing the relevant image isn’t available on Google as the image doesn’t meet certain conditions. We recommend you please review the image conditions guide that appears on the screenshot you have posted on the Google webmaster forum.
In addition, we also see that someone posted on the Google webmaster forum about pirated content on your site. You may also want to consider looking into it.
Yes I did inspect the image. I’m not sure whether it’s not indexed by Google because of what condition. Because on the warning message, it’s shown that it’s blocked by robots.txt.
We are afraid to say that we aren’t sure why the relevant image isn’t being indexed by Google but we do know that there’s nothing wrong with the robots.txt crawl rules on your site.
It is very common that Google doesn’t always crawl everything. In addition, it also takes a while and eventually crawls it. So, you may keep monitoring the relevant image to see what happens after a while.
Hi Yoast team,
Do you think having a specific image sitemap would matter? If yes, how do I do it? Because all my sitemap is generated by Yoast
@geoffrey25 Thanks for your reply. No, having a dedicated image sitemap would not likely have an effect on this. As images on your site are already included in the sitemap generated by the Yoast SEO plugin, as they are included for the page or post that the image appears on (see image here).
If you are finding that certain images that appear on a page are not included in the Yoast sitemap due to being added by another plugins or page builder module that Yoast doesn’t recognize, you can also include those images in the sitemap by using the developer filter wpseo_sitemap_urlimages.
We have additional information on including images in the site located at the following link: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/images-in-the-xml-sitemap/
Oh I think there’s a more probable root cause on why my images are not indexed by Google.
So my images began to try not to get indexed by Google on October 2nd. On that day, we also installed a Sucuri WAF (Firewall) to our website to increase our web security. The WAF also causes our images to be served through CDN.
In order to active the WAF, I need to:
1) Change the DNS to Sucuri’s Firewall IP
2) Change the name servers to Sucuri’s name servers
Is there any step in the process of implementing WAF & CDN that I missed? Maybe someone that has the problem of having their images not indexed after the image got served through CDN.
Or is there anything that I need to do in Yoast somehow? Something that I missed for proper CDN implementation.
If you have implemented a CDN on your site that also replace the assets (images) URLs, you will need to update the relevant URLs manually by using the filter wpseo_xml_sitemap_img_src as Yoast SEO isn’t aware of the relevant URL change on your site. You can find the relevant guide here.
@geoffrey25 We checked your sitemap and do see the image URLs as not using the CDN URLs (see image here).
Since when you checked the image only, and Google is returning a response of that the URL is blocked by robots.txt but that that doesn’t seem to be the case, we would recommend the following:
First, we’d recommend checking your server logs for attempts by Google to access the images. You may not have full access to these logs so may need to contact your hosting provider and request this information. Googlebot will use a range of IPs so you can check the log for those, or the image itself to try and find these. Also, there are a number of tools and utilities online that will allow you to emulate Googlebot and other bots and them attempting to access your site/images. These can be very useful in helping determine whether the issue is truly that the bot can access the image.
Second, we suspect that the error related to the images being blocked by robots.txt may be a generic message Google is returning. It’s very possible that the issue with images may be related to the number of DMCA complaints your domain has had in the past and that Google is just returning the error related to robots.txt as a generic message and isn’t specifically listing the true cause of why/how the images are being blocked. If this is the case we’d recommend to try working with your hosting provider and Google to improve the reputation of the site (also sometimes the reputation can be related to not just the site, but the server/IP itself).
Thank you for your reply. We have checked that none of the Google Bots are blocked by the firewall.
And yes, the URLs are not served through a domain alias. The Sucuri firewall does not use a subdomain as the website content is provided through the Anycast network. Though I’m not sure whether there’s still an extra treatment that I need to do with Yoast with this situation.
Also, there’s a NOFOLLOW on the x-robots-tag. You can try to see the header on this link example: https://dailyspin.id/esports/mobile-legends/hasil-playoffs-mpl-id-season-6-day-2-onic-esports-gugur
Is that supposed to be there? The NOFOLLOW? If not, how can we remove it?
Hi @geoffrey25,
Beyond the recommendations related to Yoast SEO that we’ve already mentioned, the Google Rich Results tool shows that Google is aware that there is an image for the article, so this does not appear to be a technical issue related to Yoast SEO.
We hope you get a response on your Google support forum thread. If you have any further questions about configuring your firewall or the CDN for images, you can also try contacting your hosting provider for more specific guidance.
A nofollow in the x-robots header tells search engines not to crawl any of the links a page and should only be used for the types of pages mentioned in this guide.
Yoast SEO uses the robots meta tags, not the x-robots header if you set a page to nofollow. The robots meta tag that Yoast SEO generates shows “index, follow”, so we don’t think Yoast SEO added the header. To confirm this, does the header still appear if you temporarily deactivate the Yoast SEO plugin?
If the header still appears when Yoast SEO is deactivated, then we recommend doing a conflict check to find out if another plugin added the nofollow. We have a step-by-step guide here: How to check for plugin conflicts.
Hi Priscilla,
Actually, we found out what the culprit is! We had a plugin that caused the x-robots-tag = NOFOLLOW.
So yesterday we installed a chrome add ons called “HTTP Header Spy”. Then we deactivate all plugins and activate them one by one. And we found out the culprit. It is this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection.
We cleared delete the plugin, clear cache, and refresh. Voila! The x-robots-tag = NOFOLLOW is gone!
Hours later, Google began to index our images again! Now it can show as a snippet in Google Discover!
Thank you for your assistance! Your advice to look at a plugin that might cause conflict was truly on point.
To confirm this, does the header still appear if you temporarily deactivate the Yoast SEO plugin?
If the header still appears when Yoast SEO is deactivated, then we recommend doing a conflict check to find out if another plugin added the nofollow.
Hi,
We are glad the issue has been resolved! If you have any other questions or experience future issues please feel free to create a new topic. In the meantime, we will close this topic in order to keep the overview.
