Unexplained Traffic From Google Images

I have never had traffic from google images, 200 unique in the last hour.

[delphian]

I have a page about widgets... don't we all. Anyway, the largest feature of my site is pictures of these widgets. the site has been up for about 4 months now, and I have never gotten any traffic from Google Images. In the last hour or two I have gotten almost 200 unique visitors from google images, they keep coming in. But when i search for 'widgets' in Google Images, I dont see anything coming back from my site...? If I try all images from site:mywidgetsite.com I only see 2 widget images (old images from the original site framework).

Yet people are coming in with valid search strings for widget pictures I have.

Anyone know what could be happening?

[tedster]

Could it be geotargeting, or maybe experimetnal results sent to just some browsers and OS?

[bumpski]

Is there any chance the normal search is showing sample images?

Google has been showing 3 images on top of some normal keyword search pages. I've been getting many hits from one image that shows on top of the normal Google search results. They've been sprinkling images around on top of a few of the normal search results, probably for a year now. I still haven't figured out what the criteria are for showing these images with the SERPS. It seems like one thing may be only a few (100's) of images meet the criteria. Or perhaps these samples are hand picked keywords. To a limited extent it is worthwhile trying to make your images rank well.

[cheezdoodle]

me too...

Just started getting traffic from Google Images the other day. Kinda makes up just a little bit for how bad they've screwed us over the past week or so, so I really don't mind and didn't try to figure out what happened. I just assumed that they decided to start crawling us for images, because our site really has a ton of them and they are almost always 1000% relevent to what people are looking for. About 20% of my search engine traffic now comes from there.

[delphian]

I still can't find the same search results when I search google images with the same search strings I see in my logs.

However, by connecting to some (not all) anonymizer poxies, I am able to see the pictures indexed in google images. Is this something to do with google datacenters not matching? If so, how can I do the google image search with other datacenters?

I have seen IP address for many datacenters.. but I dont know how to query their google image search. It trys to submit the form to 'images.xx.xx.xx.xx', which doesnt exist.

Oh, but I do appreciate the traffic, no complaints, just wondering :-)

[RockyB]

My traffic has doubled in the last day, and It's ALL due to Google Image Search. They'll take my pics, but they won't touch the site itself :(

[eljefe3]

Slightly OT....

I banned the image bot about a month ago, but they still send bandwidth wasters to my site which brings in zero revenue.

[stuartc1]

I can't imagine why most people would want traffic from google images - the only sites that benifit is ones that sell graphics/photos. Other than that, the users would just come, steal the image and be gone... not the kind of traffic I'd like.

[FattyB]

Yes, I don't think we get much use out of it. I was thinking on banning the bot from indexing them. Usually what happens is filesharing sites use it to find box covers etc. Then hotlink to the image on the server.

We get tens of thousands of hits direct to images each day from these type of sites, as well as forums etc.

Not a big deal but I guess it must run into $$$ over the year.

[JonB]

I get hundreds of image searches too . But I am reluctant to ban imagebot - you never know if this might make the "other google" bot "angry" - after all image search is big part of google's popularity. They might add some minus points to your site for regular search - who knows?

[FattyB]

Jon,

Indeed, these days maybe wise to leave alone...I guess we are all becoming a bit paranoid!

The only advantage is when people maybe click to see the original page, but I think the vast majority use it to find images and then hotlink or pilfer them.

James

[SFReader]

stuartc1, I often search with Google Images, but very rarely because I want a copy of the image.

Someone looking for an image of a widget, has an interest in widgets. I welcome that traffic.

[indias next no1]

for the last 6 months i am regularly getting visitors through google images, i don't know how to block it, whether the searchers mis-using my images , don't know?

[delphian]

I have had about 30 hotlinks go up in the last 3 days. These pictures are rather large, normally 100 or 200k. *sigh*. I will be researching ways to block hotlinking to the majority of the pictures. But not all of them, I still want to provide hotlinking abilities to a few select pictures that have had their size reduced.

Any pointers would be appreciated. I'm burning about a gig per day, maybe not alot for most of you, but thats too much for me :(