Image Search links to a randomized use, not the main gallery page

[lammert]

I have a blog where most posts have a picture in them. In the header of the blog template a random picture at thumbnail size is displayed and when you click on that picture you are sent to another blogpost where the full size version of that picture can be viewed. The goal is that people are triggered by the pictures, start to browse the blog and at the end become regular visitors.

The thumbnail versions of the pictures are also present in a number of picture galleries on the blog.

Google indexes these thumbnails in their image search, and when a searcher clicks on the image in the Google search list, he is transfered to the page where Google has found that image. Unfortunately Google mostly links to the blogpost where the picture appeared at random when Googlebot fetched that post and not to the static thumnail galleries. Therefore because these thumbnail images are selected at random in the blog template, the searcher will almost always see a different picture, become disappointed and leaves.

The easiest way would be to disallow these thumbnails in my robots.txt, but that is not what I want. I would like the thumbnail images to appear in the Google image SERPs, but in such a way that they don't link to a blogpost where they randomly appeared, but link to their static image gallery instead.

The static image galleries are linked from every blogpost in the template and have therefore higher PR than most single blogposts, so higher PR doesn't seem the reason why Google prefers the blogposts over the image galleries as source for the image.

With HTML pages you can solve such problems by generating a meta robots tag in the header on the fly, but with images it's more difficult. Any ideas how I can tell Googlebot that if both page A and page B contain an image, that I want page A to be linked to from that image in the image SERPs and not page B?

[tedster]

In the header of the blog template a random picture

That's the issue, isn't it. Google doesn't do "random" - how could it? I can't see any way you could get the results you hope for with randomly selected images.

The fact that these images appear on the blog is important to their high rankings - it's connected to the blog's ranking. If you want the image gallery to get the juice, then it's got to be ranked well on its own.

[lammert]

The images appear on two places: in static galleries on that blog, and they are also randomly picked to be put in the header of blog posts. The static galleries have higher PR than most blog posts, so my hope was that Google would associate those HTML pages with the images, but unfortunately it doesn't.

I want Google to ignore the random images in the template header, something like <img src="something.jpg" rel="noindex"> but index those same images when Googlebot finds them in the galleries.

[tedster]

rel="nodinex" is only applicable to <a> elements so that solution is not going to work for the src attribute of an <img> element. How is a the "random" factor created? If you do it through javascript, then Google won't see those images at all on the blog post - that might help push Google to the gallery page.

Also, are the thumbnails created by telling the browser to resize an existing image, or do you create dedicated thumbnail sized images? If they are dedicated thumbnails, you could serve them on a blog post from a seperate directory that is blocked in robots.txt, but still allow the gallery pages to be indexed.

Are these images ranking for keywords that appear in the blog posts? That's another big factor - what keywords are the images rankings for. My guess is that the Image Search algo has an easier time determining keyword relevance from a blog post than from your image gallery page.

[lammert]

If they are dedicated thumbnails, you could serve them on a blog post from a seperate directory that is blocked in robots.txt, but still allow the gallery pages to be indexed.

That seems to be a good idea. I am on Apache and can create two virtual paths to the same physical directory with the Alias directive. The gallery can load the pictures from one virtual directory, the random picture is coming from the other directory. That path should be blocked in robots.txt.

I will try it immediately. Never thought a solution could be that simple :)