Google has introduced a new spam filter that can lead to a manual action penalty of your website. If the images that visitors see on your website are not the same images that Google sees, Google might take manual action against your website.
What is an image mismatch?
According to Google’s official help page, image mismatch means that “some of your site’s images may be displaying differently on Google’s search results pages than they are when viewed on your site.”
As a result, Google can apply a manual action to the affected portions of your website, which will affect how your site’s images are displayed in Google.
What should you do if you get an image mismatch message from Google?
If you get an image mismatch penalty message from Google, make sure that your website displays the same images to users when viewed directly through your website or within Google image search results.
When you have done this, submit a reconsideration request to Google.
A reason why Google cannot display the images from my website
Some webmasters use anti-hotlinking tools on their web pages. These anti-hotlinking tools make sure that the images from your website can only be retrieved from your own domain and not from other websites.
While it is understandable that webmasters don’t want other people to use their images, Google says that this leads to a bad user experience.
Do you have to take action?
In general, Google only applies penalties to websites that try to trick Google in one way or the other. If you do not use spammy methods on your website, you don’t have to worry about Google’s penalties.
Instead of investing your time cleaning up the damage that spammy techniques can do to your website, it is much better to start with white-hat search engine optimization techniques right from the start.
It takes longer to get high rankings with white-hat SEO methods but once your website has the high rankings, it will keep them much longer and you don’t have to be afraid of Google’s algorithm updates.
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Article by Axandra SEO software