Sometimes I use transparent png images on my sites and the content of the images is white or almost white - for example, a white logo on transparent background. These images look fine on a web site because they are located on dark background, however when Google includes them in its index they appear invisible or almost invisible in Google’s image search results like this:
Sometimes we have to make our image transparent due to site background, and google will index it. But you can set these image as no-index so they do not appear on google.
@jamiehenningsnz: you have missed the point of the question. @Lemon_Juicewants his images to appear in Google search; he’s trying to find a way to get them to display better.
You are also incorrect about using “noindex” to exclude an image from search. Noindex can only be used in a meta tag to exclude an entire page. To prevent images from being indexed, you need to specify them in your robots.txt file:
Yes, I want the transparent images to be indexed. I haven’t found any solution to that, it looks like google’s system is inadequate at the moment in this regard.
The only workaround I can think of is serve a different, non-transparent, version of the same image whenever goolebot is detected in the user agent string. Normally, such practices are forbidden, but I wonder if in this case this would be allowed - after all this is not to deceive anyone?
Yes, that’s definitely a problem on google’s end, most probably I will settle on serving different images for google. I’m a bit reluctant to submit “tickets” to Google - I’ve done it a few times and they were totally ignored, I suppose such huge companies are hard to communicate with…
