Images crawled but not indexed. Is this an issue?

[MWWWconquest]

Before July all of our pages on all of our sites were crawled and indexed. But after recent updates, there's 100s of images showing "Crawled - currently not indexed."

Example URL: https://mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/name-of-image-file.webp

Is this an issue? Should we set the /wp-content/uploads/ directory to no index? etc.

 

[infotech]

Is the webp version generated automatically by some plugin. is JPG version indexed.
Most likely lack of links pointing to it, google determines it to not very useful to index and display in search results.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Is the webp version generated automatically by some plugin. is JPG version indexed.

This is likely what's going on. There's already a "canonical" version indexed before you switched to .webp files.

And no, it's never a problem that something isn't indexed, unless you wanted it to be indexed. It sounds like you don't want it indexed or you wouldn't be asking about setting the entire directory to noindex.

Is there a specific concern here or is this one of those "I noticed something in Search Console and I'm not entirely sure what it's about and just in case it's a problem I'll ask about it" type of questions?

 

[MWWWconquest]

This is likely what's going on. There's already a "canonical" version indexed before you switched to .webp files.

And no, it's never a problem that something isn't indexed, unless you wanted it to be indexed. It sounds like you don't want it indexed or you wouldn't be asking about setting the entire directory to noindex.

Is there a specific concern here or is this one of those "I noticed something in Search Console and I'm not entirely sure what it's about and just in case it's a problem I'll ask about it" type of questions?

We do not use a plugin to modify file types or compress our images. They're all uploaded as webp and pre-compressed under 25-50kb.

Essentially, we want them indexed, but we're concerned the increase of "Crawled - currently not indexed" pages are hurting our panda score and wasting or abusing our crawl budget. So the idea to not index the image directory would be to lower the amount of "crawled but not indexed" pages in GSC.

I may be entirely off here, but perhaps these images being crawled but not indexed is a negative in the same way portal pages or attachment pages are. Or maybe it's something else.

So I'm more so wondering if having these 100s of new crawled/ not indexed pictures has the potential to hurt our panda score? Or should it be a cause for concern?

 

[Ryuzaki]

In my experience, Panda only concerns itself with what is indexed. So any unindexed images wouldn’t be a problem if this is true.

Google is pretty adamant that most websites don’t need to worry about crawl budgets. I do try to take it into consideration but there’s also times where it’s out of our control like people linking to non-existent pages and creating 404 errors, etc.

Are these new images not being indexed yet or old ones becoming unindexed? Might just be an issue of waiting it out. I don’t think you need to do anything even now, personally.

 

[MWWWconquest]

Are these new images not being indexed yet or old ones becoming unindexed? Might just be an issue of waiting it out. I don’t think you need to do anything even now, personally.

I believe they're newish images not being indexed.

It's difficult to tell if an image was unindexed per GSC data, but I can see some images from older posts were either been crawled late (months after), or recrawled and remained unindexed. Not sure if there's another way do do this.

I went to google and did a "site:mysite.com" function, went to images, copied/pasted into an excel sheet so I'll be able to see if images are being unindexed later on. As well as have a rough count on how many are indexed.

But yeah, I think you're right on waiting it out. Google gods are just playing games with us. If I notice anything with these I'll come back to update the thread.