With the new Google Panda updates, bloggers need to think more carefully about images placed within blog posts. This is particularly important for real estate bloggers who typically include a large number of pictures for property listings. Too many images at the top of a page can lead to lower rankings! Below is information on blog images and the impact on Google rankings.

What You Need to Know About Images on Pages

Google released an update to its algorithm in January 2012 that includes an evaluation of content above the fold (what visitors can see on a page without scrolling). Websites with primarily ads above the fold may be penalized. This is meant to target websites that bombard visitors with advertisements, rather than the content they were expecting to see, and require scrolling to see the text content.  Because ads are normally represented by images, web pages with a lot of images near the top may be affected as well.

Handling Listing Images

Real estate professionals blogging about real estate listings will need to change the formatting of future blog posts to avoid being penalized. Instead of displaying listing photos near the top of blog posts, they should be placed somewhere below the fold instead. This includes grids of images and  slide shows.

Best Practices for All Types of Blogs

For all types of blogs, it is best to highlight text at the top of the blog post and insert images further down. Although we all hope that Google will add some additional intelligence to recognize images with internal links over true advertising, it is unknown when and if that will occur. We hope that this information on blog images and the impact on Google rankings was helpful. Subscribe to our blog for other updates and advice!