A few weeks ago, Google began upping how many images they show in the featured snippets box and we saw more feature snippets with different image sources from the content Google pulled. So the image and the content in the featured snippet sourced different web sites.

Here is one of many examples:

Query is for [how to tie a shoe] and it sourced kidspot.com for the content and prezi.com for the image.

I am seeing more and more complaints that Google is doing this every day. But the truth is that Google News has done this for years and years. Google News will show up in both news.google.com or on web search, and will show content from one site and often an image from another site. Here is a screen shot of one of many examples:

Again, this has been the norm for probably ten years.

Google’s John Mueller finally responded to some of the complaints basically saying this is the norm.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help and Twitter.