Google's John Mueller was asked if using stock photography on your pages would hurt the page's chances of ranking well in Google search. Do you need a unique image per page? John Mueller responded on Twitter that "it doesn't matter for web-search directly."
He did add "for image search, if it's the same image as used in many places, it'll be harder."
Here are those tweets:
It doesn't matter for web-search directly. For image search, if it's the same image as used in many places, it'll be harder. (There's also the potential impact on users, after search happens, eg: does it affect conversions if your team photo is obvious stock photography?)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 27, 2020
Now, John did say in December 2018 that it is worthwhile to have unique images on your pages. But again, here he was referencing image search ranking. He said:
I think having a unique photo is definitely a good idea. Because if it's the same photo that's reused across a number of different articles, we'll we'll pick one of those articles for for image search to show as the landing page for that. So you're kind of in the same group with everyone else if it's the same photo. Whereas if it's a different photo, then we we can show it separately in image search but that's specific to image search.It's not the case that if you have good images that they will make your site rank better in web search. So it's kind of kind of separate there. But that's something where but sometimes good images show up as well in the normal search results. With like or you have the the images one bar on top or something like that. So I I think if you have a chance to to have your own images I think that's definitely worthwhile.
I was trying to find that classic stock photo everyone uses with a smiling call center representative, but I used a cat instead for this story.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
