Member Avatar for Zorrro

So it has become a big news in India, when you search top 10 criminals then google shows 3 images of Indian Prime Minister and people aren't happy about it.

When I tried searching and read article about it, the article claims that first image is from some other website(The Telegraph) referring to old controversy involiving The Prime Minister, but the first 2 images in google are from same article.

So could this whole thing be publicity stunt by that website? Maybe Dani can tell if google can replace image links from old article(which was from different site) to new one which hosts this article?

Edited by Dani because: Moved to SEO forum
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Dani AI

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Short answer: this looks far more like an indexing/attribution issue than a deliberate “publicity stunt.” ’s instinct that it’s algorithmic is on target, and ’s concern about an aggregator-scraper trying to get traffic is a realistic possibility. Google Images selects thumbnails and links based on which page + image the index thinks best matches the query at crawl time — that can sometimes mean a copy or aggregator shows up instead of the original if its metadata, page context, or linking signals are stronger.

Concrete checks that clarify what happened:

  1. Open the image in a new tab to see the actual image URL and domain (this shows who is serving the file).
  2. Run a reverse image search to find where the image first appeared and other copies.
  3. Inspect the page HTML for og:image, alt text and link rel="canonical" — wrong or missing tags let copies outrank originals.
  4. Check cached/archived copies (or the site’s publish dates) to see which page published the image first.

Why copies can outrank originals, and what to do:

  • Scrapers that republish an image with clearer page titles, better surrounding text, or more backlinks can get picked by Google as the “best” result.
  • Site owners should host their own images, add descriptive alt and Open Graph tags, publish an image sitemap, use proper canonical tags, and, if needed, block hotlinking at the server level.
  • If an image is used without permission, the original publisher can pursue takedown through the host or via Google’s removal processes.

Bottom line: manipulation is possible but unlikely to be a coordinated “stunt” by a reputable publisher — it’s usually a combination of scraping, metadata and indexing signals. The practical fixes above are the right place to start.

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Member Avatar for Dani

I highly doubt it's a publicity stunt by the Telegraph. I'm sure it's just a case of googlebot's faulty AI.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about Google replacing image links from the old article??

Member Avatar for Zorrro

Well the images in google are from website called topyaps, pointing to same article which claims that the images are from The Telegraph.

So I mean stunt or trick by this topyaps website to generate traffic?

Edited by Zorrro
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