Google Images - Ten times higher referals than regular search

[buksida]

Not sure whether this is normal or not, one of the sites I manage is a year old site that just emerged from the sandbox and is now doing quite well.

However my stats reveal that referals from Google image search is almost ten times higher than regular search referals. Is there any reason for this and anything that can be done to tip the balance in the other direction?

[tedster]

Well, it's not the normal expectation in my experience unless you are actively trying for it. Is this traffic doing you any good?

[neo_brown]

I have the same issue on one of my sites.
Thousands of referals from image search. I just assumed that it is far easier to rank in the image search than it is in standard serps since most people do not even try to rank for images.
I dont know if you should be doing anything about this, aside form what you would already do, try to rank higher for your keywords.

[Jon_King]

tedster, can you say Adsense :). These image listing conversions are quite the cat's meow as far as I'm concerened.

[trinorthlighting]

I am getting more refferals from google images as well but it is also bringing business as well. Wonder how images factors into serp ranking....

[BigDave]

And I thought I was doing good in Image with it being 10% of the google total. It is still more than either MSN or Yahoo.

[ronburk]

Thousands of referals from image search.

Wow! Can you give any hint of what the heck people are searching for so many times (assuming it's not the ever-popular clothing-deprived teenaged girl)?

I have no clue what people are searching for in Google Images beyond porn. Are there any tools for discovering what's going on there?

[buksida]

Not sure if I'm allowed to say what the site is about so edit if required.

Its a scuba diving website so I guess people are looking for images of fish ... there are a lot of them on there, I have also named each image after its content so I guess that helps.

Traffic is okay, it could be better but again I'm not sure what the norm is. It gets around 15,000 visitors a month and is about a year old domain now.

Its just the "times ten" factor that got me concerned, I would love to see actual G referals up by that amount, at the moment they are very low compared to other referers.

[RockyB]

Google Image search is by far my biggest refferer. And it was totally luck of the draw too. I'm ranked very high for the term <keyword removed> on there, which is sending me around 400 people a day!

It was originally only supposed to be a wallpaper in a small sub-section buried deep in my site. Now it's my most popular page :/

[edited by: tedster at 9:09 am (utc) on Mar. 3, 2006]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[percentages]

Ranking high in Google or Yahoo image search is easy for many common terms. SO WHAT!

Do they convert? That is the question. Ranking high is pointless and costly if they don't convert!

Traffic is usually a good thing, but not always in images. You have to make them convert, otherwise it is largely wasted bandwidth :(

[Genie]

About the only thing you can do to tip the balance in the other direction is bar Googlebot from your images.

[caran1]

I am facing the same problem. I get a lot of referrals from Google images but very few from regular search. This website has got 350+ pages, but compared to my other 7 websites (none of which have images) I receive almost no search engine text referrals.

[uptil7000]

I have been ranking well for a search image for about 3 years. I was surprised when it first showed up in my logs. No traffic conversion to really speak of due to the way Google displays them.

Seems like most people searching for images are looking to steal your content. That one image is all over the net now.

[BigDave]

Whether the traffic "converts" is only a concern if you are in the small minority of websites that are actually selling something.

Even then, if someone is looking for pictures of an item that is on your e-commerce site and they actually go to your site, doesn't that increase the awareness of your store?

If you get 10 times as many visitors from images as you do from regular search, and they only convert 1/20 as well, isn't that still a worthwhile amount of sales?

It's kinda like moving your retail store to a shopping mall, your conversion rate goes down, but your increase in traffic and visibility more than makes up for it.

[ScottD]

So what are the best ways of doing well in the image searches? We do very well in normal searches but I don't see us in the image searches.

We have PR6, we have image alt tags, we have plenty of content related to the key phrases...what more should we do for image searches?

[Lorel]

Seems like most people searching for images are looking to steal your content. That one image is all over the net now.

I suspect the same or graphic designers looking for ideas. I always turn off google images unless the site is selling something in the images.

And I have seen the same result on most of my clients with new sites--they are online a few months, then Google images start up--but no Regular searches. So I disallow Google images.

[caran1]

How to disallow Google Images?

[neo_brown]

Im sure the motives of searchers vary greatly depending on the content of the site.
It may be worthless to you but it may not. As previously stated, if it means one more person is aware of my site and what services it offers then great. Bandwidth isnt currently a problem (now I have prevented people hotlinking) so I wont knock it.

[acersun]

scottD:

So what are the best ways of doing well in the image searches? We do very well in normal searches but I don't see us in the image searches.

We have PR6, we have image alt tags, we have plenty of content related to the key phrases...what more should we do for image searches?

I ask my self the same. Any hints?

[webzilla]

We have PR6, we have image alt tags, we have plenty of content related to the key phrases...what more should we do for image searches?

I may be wrong, but I believe that having the image hyperlinked, in addition to using of an "alt" tag, is one of the strongest boosters.

[RockyB]

webzilla, thinking about it, that would explain a LOT about why my images are getting hit on for that phrase. That is about the only one on my site which is hyperlinked.

That's given me some food for thought.

[hermosa]

I was just about to start a thread about this. My traffic from Google searches is WAY down. No matter what I do I simply can't rank for 2 word terms. It's strange as I have had this URL for about 6 years now but only transferred it to it's own sever 2 years ago. (Before I had URL forwarding and it was hosted at my ISP...I had EXCELLENT traffic and results then). Another site I launched about 2 1/4 years ago is doing very well.

The strange thing is I am getting TONS of hits from image searches. I have put robots.txt files in my images directories but nothing has changed. It's like Google never drops the images.

Any advise. Yes I have verified that the robots.txt file is in the correct format.

[hermosa]

"I may be wrong, but I believe that having the image hyperlinked, in addition to using of an "alt" tag, is one of the strongest boosters.

YUP....you've hit the nail on the head. Now if I lose those hyperlinks and alt tags, what will that do to how I show up in the serps?

[caran1]

hermosa, I am also facing the same problem. I am trying my best to increase traffic from search, but nothing seems to work. I thought it was problem with hosting, I changed hosting 2 months back, but the regular search traffic continues to decline. My other sites,3 of which are less than 6 months old and have less than 50 pages each receive far more traffic from regular search.

[trinorthlighting]

How I have been getting sales from my photo's is by properly naming them in the alt tags. Example, I sell fiber optic star ceiling kits. In my alt tags I have them named exactly that. So when someone searches the images mine tend to pop up at the top of the search. They click to my site and purchase. Its hit or miss though. Remember, a lot of people probally use google images to window shop. If I am looking for a couch, I could type in couch and find thousands of images. From there I can window shop for the color and style of the couch. If I see one I like I just click the picture.

[caran1]

I dont mind getting additional traffic, but i feel it is at the expense of regular search traffic. I would prefer regular search traffic any time

[hermosa]

But how do I block Googlebot from my images directory. It isn't respecting my robots.txt file

[Halfdeck]

I assume you're using this in your robots.txt?

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/xyz.jpg

[hermosa]

No I haven't used that. I want to completely block googlebot from the images directory.

[percentages]

>Whether the traffic "converts" is only a concern if you are in the small minority of websites that are actually selling something.

"Small minority"?

It seems like the vast majority of sites I visit are selling something, even this one sells ads.

I actually can't remember the last site I visited that has "absolutely no commercial value". Usually there are Ads, sponsors, affiliates, link exchanges or something of some value.

Therefore I conclude that almost everyone is in the business of converting traffic to some kind of reward, not always ecommerce, but, never-the-less, some type of financial reward.