Back in mid-June, I noticed that Google was not showing many of my images in Google Search and Discover and also some readers were pointing it out to me. So I used the handy Google Search Console URL Inspection tool to find out those S3 URLs I was using to host my images were blocking Googlebot from crawling. Here is a bit of a case study from yours truly of an indexing/crawling issue I had for my image URLs.
This AWS bug led to an 83% drop in the impressions my images were getting from Google Search and Google Images. It led to a 76% drop in image search related clicks to this site. I am still down several weeks later by about 16% in impressions and 26% in clicks from image search but it is a huge improvement.
Here is the Google Search Console Search Performance report showing the impressions and clicks chart over time. You will see the drop around June 15th, then it start to pick back up around July 8th. You will also see that my image traffic has still not fully returned to its normal numbers pre-AWS bug, even after two months:
When Googlebot was trying to access my image URLs on S3, Google was getting a 404 not found error. But when I visited the URLs with my computer, they loaded just fine. These are the same image URLs I have been using on this site for well over a decade and poof, one day, AWS decided to block Googlebot. I reached out to both Google and AWS about the issue and I suspect it was a pretty big issue. Tons of sites use S3 for image and file storage, so Googlebot was likely getting tons of 404 errors. The weird part is that I saw zero public complaints about the issue.
In any event, this is what Googlebot saw when they tried to crawl those URLs:
AWS fixed it after several days:
This is what my images looked like in the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console:
It should look something like this:
Since then, I decided to move my images to AWS’s CloudFront – a service that was not available when I first made this site – which is why I used S3 back then for images. The S3 issue with Googlebot is still fixed and working fine. But I am not going back to S3 for images.
I should thank Glenn Gabe for also noticing the images going away early on in Google Discover. Glenn also wrote up this image migration article which I reviewed before making the switch from AWS S3 to AWS CloudFront. I did not migrate my old images, I left them, because AWS fixed the issue. But since late June, all my new images are using CloudFront.
To be clear, this was not a Google bug, but an AWS change that led to AWS S3 blocking Googlebot. It is now resolved but it seems like the damage has been done… If the graphs change more, I will update this story below to document the changes. But so far, it has been flat for the past 5 weeks or so, so I am not expecting big changes in the future.
Forum discussion at X.