Fallen out of Google Images

Hotlinking code may be too aggressive.

[UserFriendly]

I notice that Google Images no longer links to my site at all. It used to carry hundreds of my photographs, and now none are listed.

I thought my .htaccess anti-hotlinking code would allow Google Images (and Yahoo! Images) to still crawl and refer to the images, but apparently this is not the case.

So I'd like to know what current thinking is:

Is there a significant benefit to having hundreds of images listed in Google Images and Yahoo! Images, or do they basically just act as a giant hotlink menu for bloggers?

[le_ffrench]

Last February, I volontarily removed the largest sized photos from one of my websites from Google Images.

I thought that the number of persons accessing the images directly from Google images was far higher than the number of visits I got that way.
Since February, only smaller sized images are available. Since February, the number of refers from Google Images has been divided by 4 or 5.

The other problem with Google Images is that it only seems to do a few updates a year. If your images disappear from it, they may not be reindexed before several months.

My advice would be to do whatever you can to enable google images to index your photos and include a small text area in them with the copyright and your website's URL. This may also limit hotlinking.

[jetteroheller]

I always think on a hotlink protection at my sites,
but I think not a general.

I think it's enough to look out the 10 greatest violators
like myspace.com and so...

[texasville]

When all the pages on my site (except the index page) went supplemental, all the images on them were dropped from google. I was getting several hits a day and since they were product pages that was a good thing.

[bumpski]

Do you have Frame Buster code as well?

[jomaxx]

FWIW, anti-hotlinking code will not prevent Google from spidering your images unless you are blocking blank referrers in addition to third-party referrers (very few sites do this).

[hfguide]

Is there a significant benefit to having hundreds of images listed in Google Images and Yahoo! Images, or do they basically just act as a giant hotlink menu for bloggers?

It depends on the aims of your site. If your images are part of some personal artistic gallery/ portfolio showcasing your talents, then I can't really see a benefit. From my experience, many Google Image visitors are people who are not interested in discovering art or new seb sites for "artistic" reasons. They are just leechers and hotlinkers. Once they find your image, they will happily forget it and move on to the next site.

Another problem with GI visitors is that they usually come in the thousands per day, which can be devastating for your site if it's non-commercial/ non profit. They make your site soak up memory/ CPU resources, forcing you to go dedicated. And for what? For a crowd of people who are just looking to hotlink or grab images for their cyber projects. If you can't afford spending over a $100 a month for a dedicated account, those extra eyeballs are not worth it.

If, however, you're offering images for download AND it's a commercial site (i.e., you have Google Ads), it can be beneficial, but only in terms of revenue. Many of those people *do* click on ads, even though they don't convert. If you are lucky, you can earn just enough revenue to make up for the higher costs of webhosting.

But that's IF it's a commercial site and you WANT to offer your images to the public. Otherwise, forget it...