Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
There is one thing I dont understand, my site is still 100% filtered with there "Moderate SafeSearch is on" I maybe got 30% which could go under there, but thats not even sure, be cause there is no nudity on my site, but ok we are talking about american company. Still I dont get it, WHY is the whole site filtered out of the real results, with filter off all pictures are there, I have seen many sites which have NO pictures with filter on and there is also no nude stuff.
I just checked all sites from 1-10 on page 1 for our main keyword on google, non of those have images in the google image results.
This could also be related to there problem with to little harddisc space, you can see over the last 2 years, we got omitted results, supplemental results and now they maybe reduce there image DB.
many of those sites I have check are million dollar companies to the little site, also some also dont have any images when filter is off, even if the site is 5 years old.
I have the same issue on one site. About 4,000 images which brought in a significant amount of traffic before they all got filtered. We have an estimated 5% of pictures that are mature, but not explicit. But these are seperated from the rest.
I would love to hear if anyone's had success addressing a similar problem and how they managed.
For one of my sites, if I set "strict" filtering, the number of images reported, for a "site:www.example.com" image search, was reduced. I felt there was absolutely no reason for this to be true on this site.
I began investigating sites I linked to, to see if they had images that were filtered by the more conservative settings; "moderate and strict". If a site I linked to showed fewer images with "moderate" or "strict" filtering, I removed my link to that site. After removing several links to sites, and then of course waiting several months, my site now reported the same number of images regardless of the image filter setting!
It seems you can be penalized by images and text on sites you link to. Your outbound links may impact your Google Image search results!
One site I linked to was electronics related and of course in electronics you talk about SEX, the sex of connectors, male or female. Another site I removed a link to was medically related and had some slightly graphic images of surgical procedures. Again when I analyzed these sites using the site:www.example.com image search I found the number of results was reduced when the filters were more strict. So any site I linked to that failed this test (innocent or not) I removed the link to the site.
Of course now that I check today 2/10/06 the "site:" directive is returning very limited results which it is known to do during updates and other various transient Google bugs. So right now, I'd say the technique I just documented is useless, Sorry!
I do think links to sites with bad words could be a problems, it should not, but google owns the net, so we have to look at that and the sentence "do make a site for the search engine" thats not true anymore with all those guidelines official and non.
I got another site with images, there is no troubles at all and never was, its only a PR5 and it has somewhat the same external links as the site (PR7) where no images are shown with filter on.
I even see pure nature sites been gone from the image search, so its hard to find a solutions here. freedom of speach does not count in google image.
One more thing, it could also be that google is simply not indexing so many images anymore, so its more a random of sites.
I would be interested to know data update intervals of google images. If the page dont have much content other than image is it an issue? Say 80% image 20% content pages?
Could we get a little input here, it can not be that I have 7800 images on google image and not 1 show up whith filter on, I do have hmm 10% erotic, nah you can not even say that, hmm non nude images, but what about the rest ABSOLUTE not worth a filter, also I see SO many other sites in the same situation.
One of the sample images on top of the conventional search results is gone, it was an excellent traffic generator. I wish I was able to determine what criteria Google uses to show these image results previews in the conventional search results.
A generic example is searching for {fawn picture} no quotes or braces.
None show with the filter turned on and we have no adult photos. Wrote to Google and I did get a response back say that they were investigating the issue. That was a surprise to get a response.
As I've said in a few threads, I'm still surprised to see hotlinkers in a site:mysite search, especially when hotlink protection stops the images from actually being displayed.
SafeSearch Off: 44,800
SafeSearch Moderate: 44,300
SafeSearch Strict: 45,300
That's right the overall numbers indicate that you see more with SafeSearch in 'strict' mode...
When I actually search for an adult topic our images show up no matter what the SafeSearch setting, though we're not ranked as highly on strict searches as we are on moderate and 'off' searches.
I'm wondering what's behind the difference in numbers... I know the numbers Google shows are estimates and there's some rounding error, but Matt Cutts had said in one of his videos that the numbers were accurate to 3 significant digits - so it's more than rounding error. It almost looks like the different searches are hitting different databases and the 'strict' database has more of our images in it than the 'off' and 'moderate' database(s).
<Sorry, no specific search terms.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 5:51 pm (utc) on Mar. 5, 2007]
Unfortunately, I'd guess based on everyone's feedback thus far that if you have any content that's flagged for safe-search, the flagging must be by domain names rather than just by individual images. If that's true, then you should move your risque' images to be served off of some other domain, or NOINDEX those pages that the particularly sensitive images are displayed upon for Googlebot.
It'd be really great if someone from Google would respond to this thread to allow webmasters to know the best ways to manage their content. For instance, is the flagging of safesearch content done by particular images, subdirectories, or by domain name?
If Google is unable to answer, I think you might have to assume that the flagging is done by domain name.
Google built this sort of game interface called "image labeler" in order to get users to tag images with keywords:
[images.google.com...]
You can opt-in to the program via Google Webmaster Tools. If you do, your site's images are submitted to the Image Labeler where random people will begin adding in keywords to associate with your images.
I believe the Image Labeler give's Google a much higher level of trust for what is contained in an image's visual content, so perhaps that would help you get your non-controversial images back into the Image SERPs.
I think that if I were you, I'd first move my mature or controversial images to a different domain, and update all my site IMG SRCs so that those pictures are all served/called from that other domain or subdomain. I'm saying this because I'm assuming that perhaps domains flagged for questionable/mature content might not be allowed by Google to participate in the program. After all, they wouldn't want to randomly show potentially offensive images to the people who are tagging their images for them.
So, another prime question for Google if they could respond to this would be: are mature-themed photos alowed to participate in the Enhanced Image Search program?
They don't display any text outlining limitations on what types of content might be allowed to participate.
There are perfectly innocent sites that sometimes get restricted because system incorrectly flag their content as mature. For instance, about 9 years ago at my company, they installed a sort of "corporate net nanny" program to keep employees from going to naughty sites. Yet, our employees had to vet all sites we linked to from our websites, so they had to view them first. That program used to ban employees from viewing sites because they'd see words like "breast" on the site's pages. So, innocent sites of plastic surgeons and fast-food chicken restaurants would get banned along with the less-innocent stuff.
