Google images

How to get high rankings in google images

[hokie409]

Does anyone have information on how to get a high ranking for Google images? Obviously you want a high page ranking and you want to label the pictures but is there anything else?

[cabowabo]

On page factors, image name, alt tag, Title on page, etc.

This isn't gospel, but it has worked for us.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[nakulgoyal]

text around images is very important...some people try to stuff the image filename with keywords and that does not seem to work at google images!

[sem4u]

Also, it does not get updated that often - maybe twice a year?

It also uses a different robot to the usual Googlebot.

[graywolf]

Wouldn't doing this increase the likelyhood of someone "stealing" your pictures?

[bull]

Better watermark your stuff before the Googlebot-Image comes. Dependent on the site topic, google images can generate quite good traffic.

[dirty_marra]

just a thought but why would you want to come top of the images search?

Unless you have a site selling pictures I really can't see the benefit.

Could someone please enlighten me.

Marra

[nalin]

Unless you have a site selling pictures I really can't see the benefit.

Could someone please enlighten me.

Your already enlightened...

[RobBroekhuis]

Not everybody runs commercial sites. I would welcome any traffic to my informational site, which centers on plants. Google imagebot is just now starting to pick up some images from my site. Many people seeking information on garden plants use the image search tab (more likely to find useful sites that way), so I think getting my images there is a good thing. YMMV.
Rob

[photoman 123]

I have set up a site for my photos, and the regular googlebot came. But I still have no visits from the ImageBot, and it has been a while. The main thing I want is to get listed in the Google Images search.. and I wondered if the image bot not visiting is something related to my site structure or something, or just part as a more general google trend..

Did any of you got visited by the google image bot lately? How often do you get visited by it?

Thanks...

[RobBroekhuis]

Photoman,
My site has been up since January '04. Googlebot came 'round in March, and has been back regularly ever since. Imagebot only showed up a week or so ago (oddly enough, my very low-key family website, about the same vintage, was visited almost immediately by Imagebot, even though it has no inbound links and no pagerank.

[indigojo]

Unless you have a site selling pictures I really can't see the benefit.
Could someone please enlighten me.

one word "porn"

[outrun]

A lot of people search for products (not porn) using image search, for one niche site according to the logs 10% of google refferals come from the image search for example I see a lot of "best widgets", "brand widgets" and just plain "widgets".

Lots of people are visual people and would rather see what they are looking for instead reading through all the manufactured rehashed content designed for search engines.

regards,
Mark

[Collieman]

Benefits other than porn sites?
Sure...look at A9.com...where they rank the images alongside the Serps.
A picture is worth a 1,000 words...and a good picture which is 1st when your serps is nowhere is a great bonus!

[Beachboy]

I use hyphen-separated keywords that accurately describe the picture and an ALT tag for that picture that more or less matches the keywords in the filename. Works very well for us. We get many thousands of hits a month on some of our sites that way.

[photoman 123]

Thank you Rob!

This is interesting information.

Now I am curious: how did you made your family site known to google in the first place? And also - did your pictures end up in the Image Search after the image bot visit, or not yet?

Thanks again,

(and, just to make it clear, I am absolutely NOT in the porn business!)

[RobBroekhuis]

I'm not quite sure what happened. Since my family site isn't targeted at the outside world, I don't follow its stats closely - but one time when I did, I noticed a few visits that came in through Google's image tab. So I never actually saw the bot come through, but it must have been no more than a few weeks beforehand, because the site was relatively new at the time.
Rob

[OptiRex]

>Unless you have a site selling pictures I really can't see the benefit.

In my experience if an image is highly placed it "appears" to have a beneficial effect in the SERPS.

I may be wrong however it is very coincidental that for a couple of keyword searches we were 10th and 14th, however after the last image update those image searches are now in the #1 position plus those two keywords are now both ranked at #1.

Has anyone else noticed this effect?

And no, it is not porn either:-)

[RobBroekhuis]

Somewhat tangential question: unlike in Googles regular search, where a click on a result takes you straight to the page of your choice (and Google doesn't know which one you chose), with image search you first go to another Google page - and therefore, in theory, Google could infer relevance or popularity of a particular image. Any idea if Google does anything with this information?

[HarryM]

Over the last few months I have been getting worthwhile traffic from individuals who arrive via an image search and then stay to look at further pages. I now take much more care about naming the images using keywords and hyphens, and if I rename one I set up a 301 indirect.

Yes, some people just steal them, but there are others who give me proper attribution with a link back. For me it's worthwhile.

[MikeNoLastName]

I just stopped by today, to look for past comments in this subject area, and by shear coincidence (or is it...?) you all happened to be discussing it.

In our case a lot of sites (blogs, online MUD gamers, news sites, sometimes even ebay sellers!) tend to include our photos (exclusive location shots, news photos, exclusive celeb photos, etc.) right on their pages, by linking them DIRECTLY from our site in most cases without even an acknowledgment of us as the source or a link to our site html. I can see all their visitors to their page in our logs and in some cases it can make a pretty large dent in our bandwidth when it's a busy site or high-interest topic. My question is, does this link to our PHOTO jpg help our domain PR or serps in any way (even as say a backlink), or should I continue doing what I've done in the past. What I do now, once I discover it in the logs, is replace the large photo with a small size graphic which says something to the effect of: "This Photo Was stolen from: ourdomain.com, goto: ourdomain.com/xyz.htm to see the original in context." I then move the original and change the original link on OUR site. (he-he, one time someone was selling something on e-bay with it and I changed it to say the guy was a rip-off and where bidders could find the item cheaper! That'll teach him to steal our bandwidth... :-)
If anyone has any firm evidence that this counts as a backlink, in the regular serps OR the graphic images even, I would feel better about it and maybe allow it.
In the past it's been simply too much hassle to find contact info for them all and write them, argue with them, etc.

Mike

[Larryhat]

Hello Mike Noname:

I've done the same thing a number of times, i.e. when I find one of my special maps images hot-linked, I swap .gif filenames and present the hot-linker with an image exposing the perp, or at least pointing back to my site.
Its a pity that isn't clickable.

One blog in Korea was costing me BW with some very popular .jpg images, all hard original research.
I never could get into the site to see what they were doing, password protected to the hilt and all in Korean.
I finally gave up and substituted some gross pornography. I hope they enjoyed that. - Larry

[borad]

Going by one of my examples where I'm ranking top, I have to conclude that link text is EXTREMELY important.

(this is for a pic that is not embedded in a page as such)

And as noted, it's not necessarily a blessing to rank high.

[photoman 123]

Well, the last few posts made mw wonder - does googlebombing work also for the image search?

If you don't mind, I want to suggest an experiament.
I'll take my really old personal site which have a page rank of 0 and which I don't really care about, and invite you all to link to 2 pictures there, each with a different keyword, and see what happens.
And I will report the progress here at this forum, of course.

The 2 images I thought about are:
[intertent.ath.cx...]
with the anchor text "yoav" (which isn't very competitive)
and:
[intertent.ath.cx...]
with anchor text "student", which is rather competitive.
(although specifically chose both pictures to be quite relevant to the search term, and not go over anyones business)

Any one interested in trying?

[borad]

To clarify my link text example: to my knowledge, there are only two links to the example photo, both from my site. One link has the keyword in the link text, one has that word once near the link. The file does not have the keyword. The site is absolutely not themed on the topic -- and the vast majority of competitors sites WOULD be themed strongly.

No, I don't understand it either!

[webdude]

Be aware before you go and rename all your images.

I decided to do this on one of my hobby sites. The problem is that the image bot is usually very slow to crawl and a lot of times it uses data that can be up to 6 months old. I made the mistake of changing the names and the names of pages with the large images on them and about 4 months later, when the bot finally got around to crawling for the images, it tried crawling very old data. Of course it couldn't find the pages and got nothing but 404 errors. I ended up waiting another 6 months 'til the bot came back to get it right.

Conclusion is that whatever you do, it usually takes a long, long time to see the results.