Are Photographs Considered to be Content?

According to the Google AdSense TOS

[Sobriquet]

The TOS says that there one should not place an ad on pages without content.

On the other hand, I have read about image galleries with adsense ( not so successful, yet allowed) .

Does anyone have any expereince about this? Is an image considred to be a content in refrence to adsense tos?

How does google value images vis-a-vis text content? Is a picture only valued for its filename and alt text? I dont know if google has technology which can understand what a picture may convey. A painting may show emotions or a newspaper picture may convey a news item. How would google evaluate them?

One of the methods which google may be using is a long descrition tag. But will a picture, with an alt tag and a long description tag be considered is valid content for google adsense tos purpose?

Is a white blank page, with a single grahpic ( with alt, long desc) and a text title ( may Paintings by Picasso ) enough for adsense bot to show ads, and be allowed in adsense?

This seems to be one of the many gray areas, where a painting may mean a thousand words, but to google it may mean nothing ...

What do you people think?

[lammert]

danimal, I think you were missing the essential part of EFV's post. With the HTML based flat-file approach every picture has its own surrounding unique text and serves as an individual entry point to your site for search engine traffic.

When you use galleries which link to the separate picture files, these unique entry points will be lost and only the gallery is indexed. This will cost you free traffic and therefore AdSense income. Furhter more opening every picture in a new window is not what everybody likes and with such a site I'd rather click the back button than browse the pictures.

[danimal]

appreciate the feedback lammert... what i didn't miss about efv's repeated posts to this thread was the fact that she is fud-mongering something that she clearly hasn't tried doing.

>>>When you use galleries which link to the separate picture files, these unique entry points will be lost and only the gallery is indexed.<<<

have either of you worked with image traffic search results? because every photo is a unique entry point, and you are competing only with other photos, not billions of other web pages.

so while your focus is on increasing web pages, what you should be doing is learning how to get your images ranked instead.

yes, individual pages with photos also rank for image results, but how many pages with single photos can you put up? and the useability of the website goes to hell trying to navigate it all... people hate having to reload a page every time that they want to see a photo.

don't you agree with the point that efv made about low ctr and low ecpm with the flat file approach? it ends up lowering your earnings across your entire adsense account... you make less money with the flat file approach, so much less that she's out here telling you not to do it.

i'm not saying that all image galleries are going to dominate... in fact, it's just the opposite... if you don't understand how people navigate sites and pages, you won't get a reasonable ctr.

[danimal]

and btw, you don't have to open a new window every time that a photo gets clicked... just embed the main pic window in the page, so that the pics get rotated thru the window as the picons are clicked on... the page doesn't get reloaded, and there is still room for decent ad placements.

[OptiRex]

I have been keeping quiet about this since I could not see what the problem is however I have to comment since it is becoming silly!

Images are content so long as you know how to present them correctly and complete all the tags etc.

My sites are 90+% images, some have technical descriptions and further information, many do not.

I have thousands of images and they nearly all rank #1 and I derive most of my traffic through them since people want to know the correct niche colour and so forth.

If you want an image to rank well then create its own page, it's not that difficult.

This is a simple issue, if you have a problem, sticky me.

[Sobriquet]

OptiRex, how is your CTR on the image only pages?
also, how relevant are the ads?

[europeforvisitors]

danimal, I'm a he (just for the record), and nobody's "fud-mongering." As for image search, that may be a great way to get traffic on photos (it works with flat files too, by the way), but does it drive the kind of traffic that works well with AdSense? I'm skeptical, but to each his own.

[airhart360]

As I understand it, you need the alt tags to be visible and a frame around the picture to separate it from the AdSense to please Google.

[DamonHD]

Hi danimal,

I'm glad that EFV got to point out his gender before I had to (!), and in answer to your "how many" question (if I understood it correctly), for my main AS site ~18,000 (and rising) individually-catalogued images/sounds/clips each in their own page since 1997.

Rgds

Damon

[caran1]

The photographs/drawings on my website have some descriptive text and specifications. CTR is average but CPM is fairly high, since they are high value products

[Wizard]

I have problem with understanding this policy:

"In order to avoid associations with copyright claims, website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results."

AdSenseAdvisor said:

...placing ads on image-based pages is not a violation of our program policies...

I have pages with images and with music in MP3 made on my own. They include copyright information where I claim to be the author of the material published and they are included in DMOZ, so one could hardly accuse the site about not respecting the copyright. Pages with music in MP3 are very content rich, pages with images has smaller amount of text, but still there are enough descriptions to be properly indexed by Google - they rank quite well for appropriate keywords.

I'd really like to add Adsense to this pages, but I'm afraid it would be violation of the policy I cited above. AdSenseAdvisor please help me.

[ken_b]

may not display Google ads on web pages with MP3, Video, News Groups, and Image Results

Notice the word results at the end of that statement. I think this applies to search results pages where the images shown are not your own. Google image search is a good example.

[Wizard]

I think this applies to search results pages where the images shown are not your own.

I also guess it could be so, but I prefer to ask than to have my account suspended.