Our question comes from Madeline, who asked during a recent webinar:
“How does the metadata on photos help increase rankings?”
That’s a great question, and it’s something that is overlooked in SEO.
What Is Image Metadata?
For anyone in SEO, the concept of “metadata” will be familiar to you – it’s information that describes aspects of the page.
In SEO, we talk about page titles, page descriptions, and other information in the <head> of the page as “metadata.”
Images also have metadata.
This information describes the aspects of the image. It includes the name of the image creator, credits, and any copyright associated with it.
People can use it to understand more about the image they are looking at. It also helps to convey that information to the search engines.
Types Of Metadata
There are several different ways to communicate information about the image. The following are methods of labeling or conveying information used specifically for images.
Structured Data
As with any structured data you would use for other elements on your webpages, image structured data can be in JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa format.
It is contained on the page itself, rather than the image, and should be used on every page the image is on.
Just using the structured data markup on one page does not guarantee that Google will know to use it again for another page where the image appears.
The type to use is ImageObject. From there, Google requires the following property to be used: contentURL.
In addition to this, you must use one of the following properties:
creator (or).
creditText (or).
copyrightNotice (or).
license.
Google also recommends using the following properties:
acquireLicensePage.
creator.
name.
creditText.
copyrightNotice.
license.
I want to clarify something about this structured markup information.
As with structured data used elsewhere on a page, it’s really not used for ranking purposes. It is used more to help search engines understand information about images so that they can enhance the image SERP results.
For example, the “licensable” label that appears over some images in Google’s Image SERPs. This allows Google to display the license conditions for that image.
When clicking on the image, the side panel then extends to give an opportunity for the user to visit the site and also find more information about this image. This information is captured through structured data.
IPTC Photo Data
The IPTC is the “global standards body of the news media.” The metadata standard it has created is used to describe photos.
According to The IPTC, the standard “is the most widely used standard because of its universal acceptance among photographers, distributors, news organizations, archivists, and developers. The schema defines metadata structure, properties, and fields, so that images are optimally described and easily accessed later.”
Google has announced in the past that it will use IPTC metadata to identify and signal that an image has been created using artificial intelligence.
Using this metadata could make an image eligible to display an “AI-generated” label in Google Images.
EXIF Data
EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is a data standard covering more specific information about how an image was captured.
For example, the camera settings, pixel dimensions, location information, and the date/time the photo was captured.
In fact, if you look at the photos you have taken on your phone, you will likely see some of this EXIF data for yourself.
Back in 2014, Matt Cutts (then Google’s head of search spam) said Google “reserve the right to use [EXIF] in rankings.”