Google’s John Mueller responded to complaints about image thumbnails still not showing up for some publishers in the search results. He encouraged a bit more patience, saying “the next one [core update] isn’t extremely far away now, so I’d recommend waiting for that.”
John wrote on LinkedIn, “There hasn’t been a fresh core update, so I would be surprised if things had changed here yet. It seems like the next one isn’t extremely far away now, so I’d recommend waiting for that.”
This was in response to a question from Martina Hirzberger who asked, “I want to remind you that the issue with thumbnails remains unresolved, and nothing has changed to date. It’s now been over four months.”
John added that he “can’t promise a specific timeline for updates – they tend to go out when they’re ready, and sometimes internal reviews & analyses bring up unexpected results that require more work.” This is similar to what Danny Sulivan, Google Search Liaison said, that the core update is coming in weeks but he can’t give a specific timeline. We have been seeing a lot of ranking volatility over the past two weeks, is this Google testing?
Google has said those issues with images now showing up are likely quality issues with the site. The complaints got so bad, Google locked down the complaint thread. As a reminder, for the past few several we have covered the vocal and visual complaints around Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that generally have image thumbnails attached to the search result snippet. Google in May responded to the large Google Webmaster Help thread in the forums by saying we know, we are still investigating, follow our guidelines and then locked the thread down.
John also added that he cannot promise any specific site will recover. ” I also can’t promise that your site – or others – will see specific effects. I know the team has been working on this, and I’m sure site owners have been making big improvements, but I really can’t make specific promises,” he wrote.
Here is a screenshot of those posts:
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.