Criteria for Google Image Search - a mystery to me

[wolfadeus]

The situation: I run a website on Widgetplace, which ranks top for a whole range great keywords, including "widgetplace", "widgetplace photo" and "widgetplace photo gallery".

I also optimised clients' websites, mostly hotels from Widgetplace. Now, I fail to rank high in google image search for "Widgetplace" or "Widgetplace Photo"; the clients, however - for which I obviously didn't optimise in any other way - I achieve some very high rankings.

There are two differences that I noticed: Topic - my site is an information website, my clients mostly hotels; image size - my pics are smaller than my clients' photos. I assume the latter one makes the key difference.

Any other suggestions?

[piatkow]

No suggestions, I gave up trying to get my photos into image search ages ago. I have pages that give good results on normal searches based soley on the alt or title tag of an image but the image itself will not be indexed at all.

[wolfadeus]

The strange thing is that several of the hotel websites rank highly at image search, very low on photo-related websearches - with my private site it is the other way round.

[iridiax]

Google image search has gotten lousy in the last year or so (high sensitivity, low specificity). Your images may be showing up, but just not for their most logical keywords. Your images may also be buried far down in the image search results behind all the header images, navigation buttons, and other unrelated and useless images from higher PR sites.

[wolfadeus]

In terms of over-all quality, the image search for the terms I tried were not very diverse, but not bad either - certainly no navigation buttons and alike. Surprisingly many maps.