You probably don't need me to tell you how beneficial it can be to get your website featured on Google Discover - and about the importance of your images.
Google's been quite transparent about the requirements to be included on Google Discover:
- Use page titles that capture the essence of the content, but in a non-clickbait fashion.
- Include compelling, high-quality images in your content, especially large images that are more likely to generate visits from Discover. Large images need to be at least 1200 px wide and enabled by the
max-image-preview:largesetting, or by using AMP. Avoid using a site logo as your image. - Avoid tactics to artificially inflate engagement by using misleading or exaggerated details in preview content (title, snippets, or images) to increase appeal, or by withholding crucial information required to understand what the content is about.
- Avoid tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity, titillation, or outrage.
- Provide content that's timely for current interests, tells a story well, or provides unique insights.
In this article I wanted to focus on image optimisation for Google Discover, including an example of how it might go wrong even if your content is picked up in the feed.
Image Requirements for Google Discover
This is where I see a lot of media sites falling short - it is recommended that for Google Discover images need to be at least 1200 pixels wide.
Note this isn't a hard and fast rule - but it is what Google is suggesting.
I think it is possible to get picked up by Google Discover if the images aren't quite right, if all the other factors are covered.
Google Discover optimisation is a bit of a dark-art but for me the important things are:
- Newsworthy/recent content that is related to current interests
- Technical elements are correct (image size, meta robots max-image-preview setting in place/AMP in use)
- An enticing title without resorting to clickbait.
- Signals from other channels that show people are interested in this content (social media engagement).
I think that approaching Google Discover with the mindset of a journalist is probably a sensible way of going about it. If your story isn't "strong" enough to get covered by a journalist, if you were to pitch it to them, then you might suffer the same fate with Google Discover too.
Recommended Image Dimensions for Google Discover
For me a good Google-Discover optimised image would be 1200 px (width) x 630 px (height) as shown below from this Guardian article (note I found this via my Google Discover feed).
Recommended Image Types for Google Discover
In terms of the image composition, I would be recommending "real" imagery in the sense of actual photos of people/animals or similar. Think stock photography and the like - these types of images aren't usually heavily edited or manipulated, they are based on real-life scenes.
That's not to say stock imagery is the route you should go - I would always opt for original photos where at all possible.
Most of the imagery I see in my feed is based on "real" images - although the odd screenshot-based-image does get shown, but this could also be due to the fact that it's largely news publishers that get featured in Google Discover, and most of those have original photographs included.
Another tip here is to avoid images that have lots of white background, as this doesn't look great in the feed anyway and potentially might not help your chances of being featured.
Using Logos within Google Discover Images
Google has recommended not to use a logo as the featured image, so don't just set your site logo as the default image here - which would have looked terrible as the hero image anyway.
It's worth noting that many big news publications, like the BBC and The Guardian do include a small logo at the bottom corner of the imagery they use. So it's not that logos can't be used fullstop - you just need to ensure it's not the sole thing within the image.
Recommended Image Format for Google Discover
I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules about image format when it comes to Google Discover optimisation, and I imagine Google does it's own kind of compression/reformating within the feed itself, so I would focus on ensuring you are using a well supported, web-friendly format (I've listed several options below).
- JPEG
- WebP
- SVG
- PNG
Note that Google does support other image formats for search (eg BMP's!) but who would want to use that format really? 🙂
As always there's an ongoing battle between image quality and size - you want to ensure it's fast loading without consisting of just a handful of pixels. Thankfully with some of the latest image formats you can greatly reduce filesize without impacting the visual quality of an image.
Should My Hero Image Render on the Page in Full Size (1200px width)?
If you look at the top of this blog post you will see my hero image is quite small - click the image to enlarge it in a new tab, where it will load fully at 1200 pixels wide.
From what I can tell it doesn't matter if the image doesn't load fullsize at the top of your page, what is more important is that Googlebot can access (and index) the large image version.
This is from my observations of checking out other articles that get picked up and featured in Google Discover so isn't a very scientific check. For example The Guardian articles use a hero image which has an onpage dimension of around 800 pixels width, but clicking to open in your browser loads a huge full screen image.
Do I need to use OG:Image Tags for Google Discover?
You should be making use of Open Graph meta data, so you should be adding og:title, og:image and of:description tags for your preview cards.
Whilst Open Graph tags are primarily used for social media, they can be utilised by Google within the Discovery feed - so it's definitely worth ensuring those tags are in use and are completed correctly!
The og:image tag should be referring to the large version of your image - the one that is 1200 pixels wide (or larger) if possible.
3 Technical Checks for Google Discover
If you think your content should be featured on Google Discover but isn't, there are a few things you might like to check.
- Is the webpage crawlable/accessible to Googlebot - you can check this from running an Inspect URL within Search Console, or using the Rich Results Testing tool.
- Is the media in use on the webpage accessible to Googlebot - again, check using the Inspect URL feature / Rich Results Testing tool. I think this is where some sites can have issues, if for example their CDN isn't configured correctly and might actually be blocking Googlebot. This could mean that your hero image (and note how important images are with Google Discover) are unavailable to Googlebot, which could really restrict your chances of inclusion within the feed.
- Have you applied Open Graph metadata to the page, covering the og:title, og:image and og:description tags for your preview card? Whilst this might not be essential it has been shown before that OG tags can be picked up and influence the card used within Google Discover.
- Have you setup the "follow" feature to encourage more follows and increase chances people see your content in their Discovery feed? Whilst this isn't essential it's definitely worth setting up if you can.
Google Discover Images Gone Wrong - Nature.com Example
I think a good example of what happens when your images aren't quite the right dimension or image ratio (the relationship between width and height) has been provided here by the Nature.com website.
Disclaimer that I can't say this for certain (checking using Google tools like the Rich Results Test show me the crawl request failed, which is likely to be a security protection measure Nature has in place) so take the below with a pinch of salt.
As you can see from the above collection of screenshots I've taken from Google Discover, each mention of Nature either has a very small image preview or no image shown.
When looking at the source code of the website the meta image tag is set correctly but the image dimensions of the OG image specified is a bit short of the recommended 1200 px width.
It could as well be an issue with the configuration of the CDN that is being used here - in which case I would check that there are no robots.txt blockage issues (both on nature.com and on the robots.txt of the CDN) as well as any potential security issues that could be preventing Googlebot from accessing any high-res versions of images used.
Nature do use a subdomain/CDN for their images but it's hard to know if there are issues as the "3rd party" Googlebot is blocked from accessing those files. In this case the "URL is not available to Google" alert isn't due to noindex tags, robots.txt blockages or similar - it just literally means the URL is not available to Google, probably because they block Googlebot requests that don't come from the "genuine" Googlebot (based on the range of IP addresses they crawl from).
I think if Nature could have large images displayed in the Discover feed they would see a huge increase in traffic from Google Discover.
Do you need help with Google Discover?
Maybe you want someone to double check the setup of your images or to find out why your content hasn't been featured on Google Discover - whatever it is, feel free to reach out for help with Google Discover optimisation.
