Can lazy loading of images affect indexing?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them.

Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?

[MickEdwards]

Although Google can now get to js, I would still be nervous on choosing a theme/CMS  that is using lazy loading.

According to John Muller from Google:

“Is Googlebot able to trigger lazy loading scripts- lazy loading images for below the fold content” – “This is a tricky thing.”

On lazy loading images John says  “test this with Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools” and “imagine those are things that Googlebot might miss out on.”

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/john-muellers-seo-advice/

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Option to index images? Or option to index image attachment pages? I've not seen the first, but I have de-indexed attachment pages because I didn't have time to make them all unique. Where do I find the option to not index images? And why would that make SEO scores better?

[Mobilio]

Yes - could be. You need to use Google SearchConsole Fetch&Render tool to identify are images is loaded at all.

Also note that some of lazy loading tools used data-src ( https://github.com/dinbror/blazy ), other pagespeed_lazy_src ( https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-lazyload-images?hl=en ) and third data-img-src and many others. You need to check what attribute your tool is used and check are images crawlable and indexed.

You need to check also Qazy - https://github.com/qnimate/Qazy yet-another-lazy-loading tool without negative SEO impact because images are loading from src attribute. And this is explained here: http://qnimate.com/lazy-loading-images-and-its-seo-impact/

So - yes this negative impact could be caused from images lazy loading too.

[Tymen]

Hi!

Big images reduce the speed on the page and speed is a(n increasingly important) ranking factor. You could use Page Speed Insights to see your overall  site speed or the speed of a specific page.

Within Worpress there is also a setting to index images as a search result or not. On my site it was on and once turned off within a few weeks my overall scores increased so maybe that helps aswell.

Good luck!

Tymen