How To Remove A Picture From Google

Sometimes negative search results take the form of images. Often these negative images are very difficult to remove from the internet. When they can be removed, it is usually from a blog post, mugshot site, or article where they were initially posted, and the site publisher must take them down. You can also turn to Google, which will remove some images from search results under certain circumstances, but it is rare. So how do you have an image removed from Google? We’ll explain.

4 Steps To Remove An Image From Google

Remove It From The Website Publishing The Image

Approach the source where the image was initially posted and ask for it to be removed. If it is a blog post or someone who understands the image is not representing the facts or that it was privately owned or illegally uploaded, they may be willing to remove it.

Question The Accuracy

If the site is a news or business site that relies on representing itself with factual information and you can prove to them the image is indeed not accurate, you may have success with a simple pulldown.

Try A DMCA Takedown Request

This may involve payment or even the purchase of the license for the image from the owner. Interestingly, even if you hire a photographer to take your picture, you may not own the image. That’s because the photographer is a contractor. It must usually be explicitly agreed in writing that you own the image the photographer is taking.

Take Legal Action

Your best approach is to be professional, polite, and transparent with your request. You can threaten legal action, but this should be a last resort.

So what do you do if a website publisher refuses to remove your image?

Contact Google To Remove The Image

If attempts to remove the image at the source have been unsuccessful, you can turn to Google. When an image violates a trademark or goes against other community standards, Google may remove it.

This usually applies to images that are copyright violations, considered “revenge porn” or contain certain personal information such as credit card numbers, medical information, or government identification.

In order to find out if an image qualifies for removal from Google search results, visit their page on the subject. If you believe the image is in violation, Google has taken several steps to streamline the application process to have it taken down.

What if Google will not remove the image

Suppose you have been unsuccessful with the initial website that posted the image and Google. In that case, you can reduce the visibility of the image, effectively removing it from Google search results using these steps:

  • Create more compelling images
  • Name the new images correctly
  • Embed the new images in the content of many sites
  • Use text to surround the image and make it all about the subject
  • Embed those images on 3rd party sites
  • Extra tip: Make them shocking or unforgettable

To remove images from where most people see them, they should be replaced by something else – something better – that people searching want to see. Just uploading a bunch of images up on various websites isn’t going to work.

Search engines want relevant images to return in search results. When an embarrassing or distasteful image appears in results, the search engine thinks it’s the best image to show. The trick with reputation management for images is to get Google to understand that negative content isn’t as relevant (as “good”) as positive content. When this happens, search results change, and the harmful content will be pushed down. Its visibility will then be greatly reduced, sometimes even disappearing.

Suppress The Image

A relevant search result is essentially the one people want to see. If someone performs a Google search for ‘Lindsay Lohan pictures,’ the search engine will return a series of images of the actress/pop star.

Optimize Your Images For Visibility In Search

To reduce the visibility of negative images on Google, better and more flattering images must be introduced into the search ecosystem and made more relevant to people performing a search. This starts the cycle of driving the new images to the forefront of searches. But how does someone make an image (or many) relevant for online reputation management purposes?

Make Better Images

First, think about what might drive people to click on an image representing the search phrase but is more positive than the current problem images. Remember, search engines provide the images, but people judge them through clicks. Images that are better lit, better formatted, or even shocking can make enough of a difference that people will click on them instead of a negative one.

Google’s image recognition AI (artificial intelligence) understands the content of images better all the time, so it will recognize the new images and test them with searchers.

Optimizing The EXIF Data

Google’s image recognition software is good, but you can help the search engine understand things better by naming the image in a way that Google AI will accurately process. It’s a common problem that people don’t consider and can not only help in image reputation but basic SEO in general.

In the example below, the image is named “lindsay-lohan-mug-shot.jpg.” Notice it has the key phrase we want search engines to find it for in the name. It’s not named something generic like ‘image-123.jpg’. Providing a descriptive name helps search engines learn what the picture is about. Do this with all of your images, but make sure the names are somewhat different each time.

Embedding Your Images In Google Search

Embed each image on several different types of web pages. This can be your own websites, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, press releases, third-party articles, and more.

There is some extra work you can do if you control a website. You can’t do this for Facebook, but you can do it for a site you own and operate. You can use ALT code that looks like this to help search engines out even more:

alt=myimage

You’ll see in the above example how we added an ALT tag to the image. So now search engines know beyond a doubt that the image is about Lindsay.

Optimize The Text On The Page

The text around an image helps as well. On each website (or other web properties), surround the image with relevant, well-written text that includes the key phrase.

Search engines take their cues for image relevance by examining not only the image and its HTML tags but the surrounding text and general theme of the page (and website if possible). So make sure the text around the image clarifies what it is for.

Embed Variations Of  Your Image

Everything you’ve read above is about “on-page” optimization – things you can do to improve the search engine ranking of an image on a site you own or, to some extent, control. But when you get other sites to embed the images into their own articles, the strategy begins to blossom. This is because search engines look for the best and most relevant images to display and pay close attention to how popular an image is on other sites. They watch how often an image is clicked on and how often it is used across the internet.