Getting noticed in google images

[lionstail]

Any hints or advice on how to get picked up in google images? Some of our images are quite successful there, would like to nudge some others along.

Thanks in advance!

[HuskyPup]

In my experience and I have thousands of images, plus it seems to be the general consensus, it would appear to be comletely random how they are picked up and indexed.

I have some 15 year old sites with widget images that have never changed urls in the past 10 years yet never been in the images but have been #1 in search for years.

I have some sites 1-2 years old using the same templates for widget images and they are #1 in images and cannot be found in search!

[lionstail]

Thanks HuskyPup- glad to see I'm not alone, but perhaps someone out there has had a different experience? Or maybe we're just lucky?

[ripejuice]

google's looking for new images and i think they can rank pretty well in image search results.

[HuskyPup]

google's looking for new images

From where did you get that information?

i think they can rank pretty well in image search results

But the question is how to?

The only consistency I see is that images from my smaller sites, say up to 100 images, seem to have their images picked-up and ranked better and faster than from my larger sites, 1,000 - 10,000 images.

[webdude]

I have a site with user submitted pics that used to have quite a few of the images in Google Images, at least serveral hundred. Orginally, they were named image1, image2, image3, etc. About a year and a half ago, I went back and renamed all the images (frank-holding-a-widget, bill-showing-his-widget, len-with-his-red-widget, etc.), added alt tags to describe the images (frank holding a widget, bill showing his widget, len with his red widget, etc.), , added titles on the pages (the same as the alts)for each image thinking this might be a way to get more of the images listed... at least that was what I got out of some research on the subject. End result is that now, there are no images in Google images... only some site based images... go figure. Been waiting for about a year for some sort of change on this. I was better off just leaving them, I guess. Images are added daily and displayed in groups of eight on the home page. Lots of images, old and new, yet still no joy...

[lionstail]

Not sure I agree- we have thousands of images on our site and some are indexed in google images. It might not have anything to do with the number of images on your site.

[pageoneresults]

Ranking Images for Web Image Retrieval
USPA 20080097981 awarded to Microsoft on 2008-04-24
[webmasterworld.com...]

There might be some "really good tips" at the above link. :)

[Tastatura]

so far I had good "luck" with images - almost to the point where hits from google images searches are starting to annoy me .

-All of images are part of the content, and load as part of the content - i.e first - before side bar(s) footer, and the rest of the stuff

- Image files are descriptively named, i.e "widget-in-the-widgetland.jpg"

- each image has unique alt tag (when I wrote them I was thinking how this would sound to a blind person visiting my site - excelent excercise in comming up with short and to the point description)

- all immages are approximately 330px X 230 px - no magic in this size, just what works for me /site

- did I mention that all images served are 100% of it size? Meaning I don't have images that are, say, 1280x1024 and then have html code to scale them to size

-on the server, images are located in the dedicated folder tree (well subdomain - but that's different story) (make sure you allow access to the bots to image folder...)

When site first went up I didn't allow bot access to image folder on purpose. When I was ready, I allowed it via robots file, and went to WMT as well. It took about a week to start seeing activity...