Will Google remove content such as images with canonical headers to other non-indexed content?

Question

I've set a canonical (.htaccess) header from an image to another one.

For instance:

site.com/image-small.jpg

has a canonical header to:

site.com/image.jpg (Original image).

However the website only uses the image-small.jpg and because of that, image.jpg was never read by Google and is not indexed (only image-small.jpg is). After about a week, the image was removed from the results.

Is it normal for Google to remove credit from content because the original content is poorly indexed?

Answer 1

Google doesn't use rel=canonical headers for images, so you're probably just seeing normal fluctuations (there's no guarantee of indexing).