Google images and supplementals

Could this explain the big drop?

[ianevans]

After reading about the site:mysite *** supplementals finder, I noticed in the first few pages that many of our original photo pages were listed as supplemental in the web index...

Could this explain why 95% of our photos disappeared from Google Images back in July?

What can be done to move the photo pages from the supplemental index?

[tedster]

Every url can have a Supplemental Index version from an earlier crawl. So before you consider any action, check your regular site: results and see if there is also a more recent cache of the same url in the regular index.

Many image oriented websites suffer from poor indexing in the regular search results because there is only minimal text content to differentiate one page from another. Unique and page-specific title tags, meta descriptions, alt attributes, and some degree of distinct on-page text can make a big difference in the regular search. I assume, but have not proven, that having a url show in the regular search can only be a help to having its images show in an image search.

And no, you cannot force a url to be removed from the Supplemental Index -- Google flushes their Supplemental Index when they choose. But you can get the same url to earn a place in the regular index. In such cases, the url may not even show as Supplemental in a regular site: query, even though you would probably still see a version of the url in the *** site: operator hack.