The store with 50,000 products and zero image traffic

The store with 50,000 products and zero image traffic

A fashion marketplace lived and died by visual search and Google Images referrals. After a 'performance' sprint, image traffic fell 71% in three weeks. Product pages were untouched.

The symptom: pages ranked the same in web search, but Google Images stopped sending anyone.

The investigation went to the markup. The sprint had swapped real src attributes for a JavaScript lazy-loader: every image now had src="placeholder.gif" and the true URL in data-src, loaded only when scrolled into view by a script. Google indexed 50,000 copies of the same gray placeholder. The real product photos, behind a scroll-triggered script, never got indexed as images.

Turns out hand-rolled lazy-loading hides image URLs from crawlers the same way it hides text — the real asset is in an attribute nothing fetches.

The fix: switch to native loading="lazy" on real <img src> tags. Same lazy behavior, but the actual URL is in the markup where crawlers read it.

Result: image-search traffic rebounded from -71% to +9% above baseline in nine weeks as 50,000 real images finally got indexed.