Google Image Search - How do you get images indexed?

[Syzygy]

Whilst being indexed very well in Google Serps, I seem to have a problem in that none of my images show in Image Search.

About a couple of months ago two images did show up - for the first time ever - but they've subsequently disappeared. What can I do to try and ensure Google picks them up?

Is alt text that important for indexing? Certainly in trying a few random image searches and picking the top results it doesn't seem to matter whether alt text is there or not.

What about punctuation in alt text - does the inclusion of certain forms of punctuation create problems? Currently, relative to my preferred formatting, I have colons and hyphens in use, although I'm changing a batch to see if this affects whether images get picked up by Google or not.

On page text is directly relevant to the images and alt text reinforces it. Enhanced Image search is enabled in Webmaster Tools. All to no avail, though...

Anything else I can do to actually get images indexed?

Syzygy

[tedster]

Google Image Search can be very frustrating and the inner workings are a bit mysterious. The technology and Google's communcation about it is certainly lagging far behind textual search -- and the updates are far less frequent.

There have been many discussions here about Image Search, but only a few ideas can be gleaned so far. I'd suggest using Site Search [webmasterworld.com] and reading up on some of the other threads. One real insight came in January:

Google Image Search traffic: Size does matter [webmasterworld.com]

The main issue that I see happening is being scrupulous about avoiding Safe Search triggers (and being very, very patient.)

[total amateur]

Hi,

Few months back a spammer joined my forum and posted some text and image links to a page that contained yet further links, which if clicked attempted to install some malware.

I immediately deleted the post. And sent the odd report to Google warning them of the malaware page.

Immediately after posting to my forum the scumbag obviously using a robot, spammed hundreds of forums/blogs and posted the URL to his now non-existant post on my forum.

Now in my Webmaster Tools, <snip> is No 1 in What Googlebot Sees

After reading the above, should I be worried and is there anything I can do

Get same results with safe search off or on

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:34 am (utc) on May 5, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[Syzygy]

Interestingly both my partner and I built separate sites at the same time. Her images got indexed by Google almost straight away, and there they've stayed.

In the main all my images are larger than hers, so size making any sort of difference appears to be a moot point.

Syzygy

[Syzygy]

Well, that's damned frustrating - in the last day or two, two images have started showing in Google, and they're buttons!

Syzygy