Penalty for stolen images?

[hospits]

Hello everybody! After a few years of reading in silence I guess it's time for my first post.
I have a website that has been penalized on the 16th of March after posting an article (on the 8th of March) with a picture taken from Google Images. That same day I updated an older article with another pictures also taken from Google Images. For the past month I haven't done anything else on / off site. The site is small with 20 pages and 50-60 backlinks. Do you think that the pictures could be the reason why the site got the -950 penalty ? If so what is the best practice: to block the googlebot-Image in robots.txt or to remove the images from the site and then block it from robots.txt ?

[sftriman]

When you say "picture take from", what do you mean? You are using the exact URL of the image? You did a screenshot, cropped, and then saved the image? You right-clicked saved the image, renamed it, and put it on your server?

[bakedjake]

No.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The site is still small and can be affected by far too many factors to be sure.

Since you mentioned links: Check your webmaster tools account and look for incoming links to pages. Follow those links back to their source and if you find them to be spammy it may be that someone targeted your site to make it look like you run an un-natural link scheme.

Bigger/older sites have established trust and can't be knocked around as easily by such tactics. On a newer/smaller site I strongly suggest you set up a rel="author" tag and link your name from your pages to your Google profile or to an about page on your site.

If you are willing to stand behind your content you'll build trust. If you're not willing to vouch for your own content then search probably got it right.

There could be many other reasons though...

[netmeg]

I never heard of a Google penalty for swiping a few images.

(I have had clients who got penalized BIGTIME by the image owners for such, but not by Google)

[hospits]

I took the picture, renamed it and put it on my server. If it's not the pictures...
The site is a niche site and every page has the targeted keyword in: title, h1, alt + picture name (just the keyword, no variations). Is this considered to be keyword stuffing ? If so, how to can I deal with it ?

[brinked]

It could be on the lines of an over optimization penalty if you are excessively using the same word over and over.

[Zivush]

I don't want to sound like a preacher but you surely know that it is not ethical to copy someone else images - Especially copyrighted works.
For the long run, I suggest you to remove any material that is not 100% yours and it really doesn't matter if you got a penalty from Google because of this issue or any other issue.

[goodroi]

Your entire site is about 20 pages, you only have 50 links and you are republishing stuff from other sites? This doesn't sound like a penalty or anything fancy. This sounds more likely to be weak SEO.

You might want to revisit your content and links.