Good Image Search results from Image Labeler?

[photopassjapan]

uh... hi there -.-

wellum, nearing our 2nd anniversary with our Image Search rankings a total catastrophe, i thought i'd check in with you guys...

we're a photo site.

We do relatively well in web search for 2 word keyphrases, and people seem to love our site from the feedback we're still getting into the 2nd year. ( it's so sad that I can sum up all that hard work in a single sentence... i think i'm gonna cry now .... )

I'm not saying we're making a living out of it, that plan was scrapped long ago :(
i think this time we could call it...
mm... a matter of pride.

not being able to rank for but a few phrases in Image Search is really something that's annoying me , to the point that i'm now suspicious of everything and anything around our site >:)

.... hotlinking.
A LOT of bandwidth wasted on hotlinking, that's taking up as much as our normal web traffic. yeah, that's like 1-2Gbytes a DAY.

I thought we would allow this so that blogs, forums, myspace users and all the bunch would have a great time posting our pics but...

now I'm suspicious that maybe this is something that's KEEPING us from ranking!

( there's someone who used our pic - not hotlinking and with our approval - and now ranks top 10 in image search, with us being nowhere. the pic is on a page that doesn't use the words, the alt tag doesn't use the words, the pic itself is a link to OUR version, his site is not even listed on web search, with us being #1. And still. It's not even funny anymore. )

...

oh btw, this wasn't the post title right?

Ok. How many of you have opted in to Image Labeler [google.com] or whatsitcalled and seen good results?
The 'game' ( yeaah, right ) that tells G what's on the pics until they develop their AI to do the same. By my calculations it'll probably be another 1-2 hundred years till they reach that point.

Did anyone see a definite change in their understanding and indexing of pics after opting in ? No matter how long it took, if there's a positive before and after comparison, we're in!

...

that's all -.-

help ^.^'

[tedster]

The silence that greets your question speaks volumes. I can say that there have so far been no positive reports on this forum that I remember, but I do recall some suspicions that it has hurt. That would be a surprise to me, but so far that's the way it has stacked up here.

I would love to hear something positive about results from this experiemntal image labeler progam.

[Reilly]

image labeler -> still deactivate
images -> hotlink protected

man, i tell you - try to protect your pictures - everybody on the net is stealing and hotlinking - every single pic is protected also the smallest - the CACHEVersion of my Site looks TERRIBLE - but thats the price...

[webastronaut]

I was reading about a couple tricks to actually get text links along with your image on the hotlinkers site by setting up some server side scripting on your server. I don't know if it's ethical but neither is hotlinking. If someone finds your image on google images and copies your image url a text link will be included in the url address.

[WiseWebDude]

webastronaut, that would scare me to do. My luck a bunch of my images would end up on a porn site and next day be gone from Google, LOL.

[rocco]

I thought hotlinking was an issue 8 years ago when bandwidth was expensive - our images get hotlinked a lot, we don't care, actually I like it.

[potentialgeek]

When you find the right hosting company you don't have to worry about bandwidth. The extreme competition has created extreme high-bandwidth hosting discounts. You have to be careful, though, because some of course aren't reliable.

Blocking hotlinking does block images from showing in the Google cache, but that's too bad for the people who for whatever stupid reason use a cache when the page hasn't been removed.

On one site I actually turned Hotlinking off and use robots.txt to stop Google from harvesting the images for Image Search. I did that to avoid smartpricing in Adsense. Click-through-rate was lower from visitors via Image Search.

p/g

[Reilly]

i stopped hotlinking with .htaccess but i let them spider by the googlebot - i was never smartpriced and i have sometimes clicks > 6$

[AndyA]

I put a stop to hotlinking a few years back, and after a while I noticed that most of my images were no longer in Google, either. Then my pages, which had all been in the top ten for years, began to fall as well.

The site was pretty dead for a year or two. Then it got hit with the 950 Penalty. Can you say Deadsville? Google traffic was literally 10% of what it had once been.

Then I started trying to fix it, and I'm not sure exactly what I did, but one of the actions I took was to allow the Image Labeling. I also removed hotlinking protection, and decided to just address the worst abusers, which for me are people running eBay auctions that link to my images, and the big sites like Facebook, etc., so I blocked those domains and allowed everyone else.

Since I've taken these steps, my images are all back and my site traffic is coming back up, although it still has a bit to go before it's where it was. I think since I let it sit for so long with penalties or whatever, it will take longer to regain Google's trust.

I found a couple of things I'd done that might have been a problem for Google, although I didn't do any of them intentionally.

I see no side effects to allowing Image Labeler, and if anything it proves that my images make sense for my site, and that they are identified properly. Perhaps it helps to improve the trust level a bit, who knows? At any rate, so far I've seen no ill effects from it, and it may very well have helped in my case.

[iridiax]

I have used hotlink protection for years and have never used the Image Labeler, and I currently get good Google image traffic. I'm also starting to see some of my images on the first page of the regular Google search results. I have the following included in my .htaccess file (I don't know how correct it is, but it seems to work to allow image searches, cache, and translations):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://.*\.search\.yahoo\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://search\.msn\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?translate.google.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*translate_c.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*babelfish.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*cache.* [NC]

The major factor affecting my Google image search traffic is whether or not my image pages are in the supplemental index or not. Those in the supplemental index will have their images removed from Google image search. I've found that for my sites, individual image pages with lots of text now perform better in image search than image gallery pages with lots of images but little text.

[Atharva]

Another thing i would do is put a small note (usually my email id and site URL) in transparent text on the bottom of the pic aka watermark

It has helped me numerous times in the way that though the images were used illegally, users used to contact me on email id for furthur sale or compensation. Also no hassles with cache, htacess etc