Be careful with existing image optimisation

I should add that I do have another 2 theories as to why we lost image rankings.

There was the problem with force HTTPS not working. (Thanks for fixing that Hristo) This causes duplicate content, which is something Google apparently penalises you for, just how much I don’t know.

I also activated lazy loading a few weeks ago, but I am led to believe this is an unlikely cause of lost rankings because if done properly, search engines can still see all images in a post. I read that due to recent updates/fixes, lazy loading by SG Optimizer should not affect SEO.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Sean.

The image optimization should not affect your SEO rankings. I would say that the fact that you’ve had mixed https and http is the problem.

Now, we’ve fixed internal stuff and strenghten security but in the next update we will add a bit more functionality to the plugin to clean up the .htaccess file. Some people have force WWW rules for example that break anything after that and so on.

Digging a bit deeper I noticed that it was on the 18 December that I created a password protected staging copy of the site, which is the same time the image rankings vanished. I also replaced the standard SSL with a Wildcard to allow staging over HTTPS. It could be that I neglected to check the Lets Encrypt settings, because when I was on a live chat recently with SG support, the Lets Encrypt toggle in cPanel was off.

Either way, it appears we can expect the image rankings to eventually recover over time.

Thanks again for all the help with my ‘issues’ Hristo, I hope I’m not nitpicking too much.

Quite the contrary, your feedback is super useful and appreciated!