: How can the number of indexed images go down in Google Webmaster Tools? I have a site with several thousand images. All those images are included in the sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster

@Heady270

It is very rare that Google indexes 100% of any large sitemap. I'd estimate that Google only indexes no more than 50% of the content that it crawls. It often doesn't include content in the indexes because of:


content duplication
low quality (or lower quality than something else that it is making room for)
low Pagerank
low site reputation
crawl errors


I have some 20,000 URL sitemaps where Google is not indexing 5 to 10 URLs at any given time. Those are usually the ones where it got some sort of error (such as connection timeout) when Googlebot last tried to fetch them.

In the case of images, there are two main things you can do to make them better indexed and ranked:


Make them larger. Google loves very large images for image search. Google views large images as very high quality. Any dimension less that 400px is probably hurting you quite a bit. 600px, 1000px, or even 1600px would be a much better size for image search.
Use the images on higher Pagerank pages. Images accumulate Pagerank just like pages do. Using an image on a popular, well linked page will make the image more likely to be indexed and will make it rank better. It doesn't matter if you <img src= the image or <a href= the image. Either way counts for Google's ranking algorithms. Just like with pages just having a sitemap isn't sufficient to get an image indexed and ranked. It has to be used somewhere that Googlebot can assign link juice to it.

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@Sue5673885

One reason for the decline could be that Google cannot find enough information about these pages in the surrounding text or in the alt attribute. The more specific and descriptive the text is, the easier Google can match these with queries.

Another possible factor is that Google has detected that your pictures are not that interesting enough to users.

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