Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Starting from today my site gets a lot of visitors from Google image search. From your experience, do this type of visits convert into quality clicks or this is just a way to burn my bandwidth and get lots of untargeted cliks?
For now I'm not seeing a significant increase in number of clicks.
Thanks
A bit of basic .htaccess will avoid any hotlinking problems... Regardless it's not that big a sacrifice to get semi-targeted visitors. Yes it is nowhere near the quality of real search engine visitors, but generally you are still getting surfers searching for term "X" to your site about "X". Bust them out of the frame and show them some ads.
I have a page in the first results for a search of a well-know painter and get about 800 visits/daily from google image search. It was a simple basic html with links direct to JPG files. So I made one page for each picture and put a lot of adsense blocks and Im satisfied. This increased the overall pageviews for unique visitors and is the channel of the entire site which converts more.
Someone said that a 3-4% CTR is low... Well, I am very below the low so. I which a could have a 4% ctr =)
Given the low cost of bandwidth I can tolerate hotlinked images that carry my url with them.
I agree, low res images are worth the advertising value of the link on them in terms of bandwidth. I have some extremely high res images though that bring my server to its knees if hotlinked by a few big forums.
Yeah, that could be a problem. I haven't made my hi-res versions avalable online.
Yes it is nowhere near the quality of real search engine visitors, but generally you are still getting surfers searching for term "X" to your site about "X". Bust them out of the frame and show them some ads.
how?
Images convert well for people looking for information - i.e. searching for anatomy of a widget. If your page is about such things, and has ads for widget anatomy, etc...
I personally will do an image search sometimes if I am looking for something and there are a lot of scraper sites coming up for it, or if I am looking for an item that has an ambiguous search term. It is really helpful. I don't know how many other people are doing this. I give my images very precise names in the hopes of attracting similar searchers this way.
but lots of them bookmark the site.
Put this code just before </head> tag in the header of your HTML.
<script language="JavaScript">
if (top!=self) {
top.location = location;
}
</script>
I redirect all external referer requests for images to thumbnails, to cut down on bandwidth.
Thanks,
Pallaton
It works like a charm. Thats the solution I've been searching for.
Cheers,
D.
I judge it by looking at the detailed stats that WebLog gives. You can see that someone comes from a google image search, looks at the page, looks around at some other pages, and then bookmarks.
When visitors click on the thumbnail to 'See full-size image' a gallery page is created with the full-size image and adsense ads on the side. I'm specifically talking about the technique suggested in this A List Apart tutorial [#*$!.com...] (if not appropriate, please delete)
I don't see this as cloaking because the visitor does get to see the full size image and I don't think that it would pose problems to Google image bot because gallery pages are served only to people with a referer other than my own site.
