For the past several months, many sites have been complaining over and over again that their image thumbnails for their websites were not showing up in the Google Search result snippets. Well, with the release of the August 2024 core update, many small publishers are starting to see their images show up in the search results again.
I looked back at some of the examples of missing thumbnail images that I covered and they are back.
Here is one example from this thread:
Here is another site that was missing an image thumbnail:
Many thumbnail images in SERPs are finally coming back for many of us that last them in March. Also, positions lost for some keywords are returning back to previous positions (or even higher).
— Sourdough Brandon (@SourdoughBrando) August 18, 2024
The issue was likely related to how Google calculated the quality of the site. Sites that didn't meet whatever was the quality threshold were unable to show images as rich results in the search results. Now with the last core update, I assume quality metrics were somewhat adjusted for some sites to meet those thresholds.
John Mueller wrote on LinkedIn late on Friday, in response to the thumbnails returning, "Whew. It's not completely rolled out yet, but I'm really happy to hear from you that it's looking positive so far."
I hope this sticks and if so, it is a win for small and independent publishers, as Google said in its August core update post.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn and Google Webmaster Help.
