This Is How blogger.googleusercontent.com Will Affect Your Image SEO

So you know last month, the way blogger was hosting images changed. Exactly what changed? Don't know.

I mean different people had different problem and they are talking about it here at the forum.

But the main thing that happened was that Blogger changed it URL where they used to host image i.e. from https://*.bp.blogspot.com to https://blogger.googleusercontent.com.

Now the images are serving fine, they are uploading and coming in the thumbnail for most of the people - but there is one problem! Do these images rank in SERP?

Here I'm going to talk about https://*.bp.blogspot.com VS https://blogger.googleusercontent.com, and how they might impact your SEO (Especially image SEO).

1. They Don't Have Names

Now the images hosted on blogger.googleusercontent.com do not contain file name as opposed to blogspot.com one. They contain random hash like shown below. This usually creates problems to crawlers as they don't exactly able to locate what's there in the image. Now they might be using some visual detection to detect what's there in the image, but they can miss out some important details.

Like for example if you have photo of a DSLR Camera. Now crawler might detect it as DSLR camera - but it won't able to see exactly which model it is. If you name your photo file as Canon-4F32-DSLR-Camera-Black.jpg, then Search engines tend to show more helpful results with search query for your image.

Example for blogger.googleusercontent.com - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgV76BcfqIXCEUmbGWQyd_s-iz_cAkRNBacwlMQgj4BtXd_USMEp3cqlTKaSqSM9KyVtvoiQv45TfgO_LsrgC7ftvcAMtWAZ3iC7LmHWfD1Ox_5S6nn1mS3KuKebtcknpM3Pcf-K1QgIDRZXvAv_KMPcnB3y-H9wInbjIrENsTtriRoxc6womv4_yJF=s1280-rw

Example for blogspot.com - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY_PA28xQQUjQrBr2egV7DAncUug-pFqKZbDqL7TOvzbayJyYKe7tFl4OyBzPkByFlrdha2O1r5UPnUQkA4jSdLFPUo9oHt0ee0f73TPdlqfEdKdL3BFUIRkkgIvfO9bzwEm7MMkndi2k/s800-rj/Shraddha-Arya-Actress.jpg

Solution : - You can still use alt tag and title tag for your images that will help both search engines as well as your site visitors.

Update : Later in the end of 2023, the uploaded pictures now have the names and also the content-description header. So this is now no longer a problem.

2. They Do Not Show Up in Search Engines

I think this is the major impact and should be solved ASAP. The images hosted on blogger.googleusercontent.com have no cache-control HTTP header. That means search engines consider it as a private image and doesn't shot it in search results.

The earlier one has this cache-control: public, max-age=86400, no-transform HTTP header so that images were able to come in the image section of SERP.

This might change in feature, but as of now some of the images still not showing this header.

Apart from this, I think no major problem has occurred. If you encountered any problem then let us know below.

3. All the Uploaded Images can be Managed in Blogger Dashboard

All the images that you upload to your blogger blog can be viewed, downloaded and deleted at one place. To open image manager in Blogger, you can go to blogger media manager.

4. Advantages

The new Blogger upload images got many advantages over the past system. These are:

1. The URL won’t expire.
2. Modifications in Google Photos won’t accidentally break images on Blogger.
3. For image owners, images appear in Google Takeout. 
4. You can find and manage data in Blogger Media Manager.

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