image search and Googlebot unchanged with Bourbon

[danny]

With Bourbon my sites have been hit by some really nasty penalty and my pages now rank nowhere for any searches, to a good first approximation. But it's interesting to note two things that HAVEN'T changed:

1) Google's image search still loves my photographs - my personal site is now getting 15x as many referrals from images.google.com as from www.google.com.

2) Googlebot still likes my sites - every page I have is being indexed daily, some of them much more often.

And both image search and Googlebot crawling have stayed pretty constant over the last year, while my search rankings have gone down and then up and then down and then way way down.

I find both these things a little surprising. If Google thinks my pages are spam (or is downgrading them for some other reason), then surely the same logic should apply to the photographs on those pages. And if my sites are so useless, why bother reindexing all the pages on them daily?

I'm just hoping these are signs that the search penalty afflicting me is only temporary.

[helleborine]

My observations as well. And like you, my site content is largely graphical.

Visitors from Google Images are poorly targetted in my case, and rarely stick around.

I'm not really sure if there is a true increase in referrals from "Images" - I think in the past, those referrals were at the bottom of the referral list.

But now, with the Bourbon juggernaut, my list of referrals is so short that the Google Images referrals *appear* more important.

[Atticus]

I get several hundred referrals from G images each day and ZERO referrals from regular SERPs (used to get 10,000 a day).

A referral from G SERPs means the user has left G and arrived at your site. A referral from G images often means that someone simply viewed your content through a G frame, without actually arriving at your domain.

No soup for you!

[silverbytes]

I didn't notice any different and referrers from images search are often undisirable...

[cyberfyber]

For my biggest site which is also graphics heavy, I've always found this to be an intermittent occurence. Even during the GOOD Days.

My next biggest site, is mainly all about photos and thus, a switch to heavy referrals from Image Surfers Early this Year
was probably appropriate.

Mind you, plenty of these folks actually DO go beyond the first page they find through Image Surfing...that is, for the second site mentioned above.