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Why are Google Images linking to the wrong page of my store?
Why are Google Images linking to the wrong page of my store?
Guy Schragger avatar
Written by Guy Schragger
Updated over a week ago

The first important point to raise here, is that neither SupaDupa, nor anyone else has control over Google Image search and the page that it associates with your Image. This is significant as, despite being in the position to provide prompts to Google, it is ultimately entirely up to Google on how images and pages are associated. The logic behind their workings has never been revealed - and would not be, to prevent those trying to game the system.

With that said, there are a few points that can be made, and considerations to bear in mind, which are:

Your Product Image appears in more than one place - your Product image appears in both the Product page itself, but also appears at the bottom of every other product in the collection. Given this, Google indexes the image and thus has to make the decision on which URL to associate with the image. You may expect the Product Page itself to be the page that the image links to - but this may not be the case. One potential reason is that Google will associate the Image with the 'higher ranking' or what it considers to be the more relevant page for the user. It could be that your Product Image appears on the bottom of another product altogether - and if that page happens to be a 'higher profile' page, due to it being linked to from a popular tweet for example, this it may be deemed more relevant, and thus be the page that Google links to for the image.

So how can this be resolved? There is no direct method, but we would suggest:

  • Making sure the Product Image has a filename that matches the Product itself. So if the image for the product: 'Star Wars Ladies T-shirt', then have the filename as: 'star-wars-ladies-tshirt.jpg' for example.

  • Make sure you specific keywords on the Product Edit page, as this will be used for the Alt Tag on the image, an attribute which further helps give context to Google for the image.



What is the page linked to is broken? If you have an image indexed in Google, and the product of the page which the image appeared on is deleted - then it stands to reason that the Google Image 'visit page' link will lead the user to a broken page (Page Not Found). This is not ideal, but the good news is that this will still include a link to the homepage of your store - but also, given time, Google will update it's index and link to a new page, assuming the image is still appearing in your store. This is an important: a lot of the issues that may be raised with Google Images will resolve itself in time - the duration of which will depend on how popular your store is - which dictates the frequency at which Google updates its index for your store.

So how does SupaDupa help? As noted at the top, this issue affects all sites, SupaDupa or otherwise - but the good news is that SupaDupa is built to assist with this immediately from the get-go - by automatically alt tagging your images based on your keywords, and adopting many other best practises to assist - such as the SEO friendly URL's, which, if they match your Image files, which go far to tie the two together.

Keep in mind that ultimately, a user reaching your store from Google Image search is a great result in itself, and odds are, the potential customer would also be interested in other products in your range. That said, we are aware of occurrences where the pages linked to aren't ideal - and we are, and will continue to investigate means to improve matters.


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