Image Mismatch: The Latest Google Webmaster Tools Manual Action Penalty

Google has a new manual action penalty within their guidelines named image mismatch.

Image mismatch is when the images on your website do not match what is shown in the Google search results. Google words it as “your site’s images may be displaying differently on Google’s search results pages than they are when viewed on your site.” It is when you are serving Google one image and the user another image, also known as a form of cloaking – but Google doesn’t call it cloaking in their document.

This morning, I covered the first manual action publicly received for this image mismatch notification at the Search Engine Roundtable. I posted this screen shot of the notification of the action:

Infographic: How To Troubleshoot Google Authorship Issues, A Step-By-Step Flowchart

In October, I spoke at SMX East about some of the opportunities and challenges when implementing Google Authorship. At about the same time, a good friend of mine reached out to me with her authorship issue. While she appeared to have authorship markup set up correctly on her blog and linked correctly from Google+, her author image wasn’t appearing in SERPs — but did show for others writing on her blog. She’s not the first person to reach out to me with an issue like this.

Authorship setup can be confusing at best, and even when you think you have everything set up correctly, you still may not see your author image. What gives? It turns out that the author image itself can have an effect on whether your authorship snippet is displayed. In the case of my friend, her photo was a close up photo of her face, but it did not show her full face.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Google prefers to show a full face with the author image, so don’t get too artsy with your selfie! When my friend changed her Google+ profile image to a full-face picture like the one on the right, her authorship snippet began showing.

My friend’s problem, and the problems I’ve seen others face with authorship, inspired me to create the handy flowchart below to help you troubleshoot what may be the issue.  Google also provides a few key points to troubleshoot authorship issues. (View a larger size flowchart here. Download and Embed Codes for the flowchart are available at the end of article. Click on the image to enlarge it.