Page 30 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

With a good understanding of how these snippets seemed to be influenced, we tried to change
one. Our first and most obvious answer was to just swap out the image with a new one but keep
everything the same. But that wouldn’t really tell us much, so instead we chose these tests:

1. Change target terms in the 50 words before and after the snippet image to include our
target terms before and after the image, removing them from the current snippet context.
2. Changing image name (URL) and just uploading a different one with the same URL
3. Move the image to the bottom of the page and put a new one in its spot.

Test Results: March 27, 2020

Changing the image name and uploading a different one with the same URL seemed like a sure
thing. We fully removed the old image from our server and uploaded a new one with the same
name, replaced it with an image that was the same exact location, image height and width as the
original. After being reindexed, nothing changed as of March 27th. Google even had the new
image indexed with the same URL and no longer listed the old one under image search. We
believe this may be a caching update or something that may take longer to change.

Shortly after reporting the above results, we got this snippet to change when updating the
image name and uploading a different one with the same URL. (Reported on April 3, 2020)

Moving the image to the bottom of the page and putting a new image in its spot, unfortunately,
didn't give any results either. The original image and new image were both indexed under image
search, but the snippet hadn't changed. If these are being pulled from machine learning and AI,
then it might be why it takes longer to update.

Test 1 did the opposite of what we wanted. We changed target terms in the 50 words before and
after the snippet image to include target terms before and after a different image, which removed
them from the current snippet context. We added the keywords in the heading, right above the
image, and in the first 20 words right after the image. We also used an exact keyword for image
name, optimized meta title and alt text with keyword variations, and used an image description
with our target term. We may have gone overboard but we wanted to see what would happen…

Almost immediately after being recrawled, Google took away the snippet completely for the
target term. We speculated this might be because the image snippet was going to change.

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