Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Very disappointing for a site with a focus on large, high quality images (outdoors).
When I google image: example.com images from other sites show up. None appear from my own site, however Google Analytics does say I get Google Image traffic! I dont how that works...
I have a similar situation with my site, a few do still show up. I suffer greatly from "Safesearch" punishment, with over a thousand images only showing up when "Safesearch" is off.
There are a few things you should check:
1 Do you get the same result with "Safesearch" off?
2 Have a look at the other sites that are showing up when you do a search for your domain, are they your images showing up? If so then they are more than likely hot linking them from your site. You will need to block the hot linking.
3 Also try searching for "site:example.com" in the image search.
4 What gallery software are you using?
Some software ends up making most of the pages appear almost the same with the same title, meta description, <h1> and so on. This is really bad as Google basically sees it as duplicate content.
5 Have you submitted a site map using Googles Webmaster Tools?
The image database only seems to update about every three months, so changes take much longer to show up.
Are you sure this was the problem?
How did you resolve the problem?
How long did it take to clean up in Google image search?
What other factors do you think can cause this problem with Safe search?
Ok, I tried to reply to one of my older posts on this subject, but was not permitted to (perhaps too long of inactivity for that thread).
< Moderator note... I trust we've got this in the right place. >
Anyway, my main site is a part of the "enhanced google search" which is the image labeler option. This site has over 400 high quality, 700x500 images. After 1 year and 7 months, ten of those images are in Google's image search index. I can't help but be disturbed when one of my secondary sites (simply a hobby site rarely updated) which I created only a year ago has every single image indexed by Google and is not included in the image labeler/enhanced search program.
A couple things: The images that are indexed via my main site in the google enhanced search have very high rankings(from #1 to #8) for various search terms. But there are only ten of them. That hurts.
What do I do on this? My main site needs to have many more images indexed and it just hasn't happened.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:30 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2009]
Ted, I'm still stuck at around 10 images, which is bizarre to say the least.
I have a couple paths of action:
1. Opt out of enhanced google image program in WMT
2. Add alt.text to my images
The images that are indexed in Google images have very high rankings for some of the keywords (#1), so I'm very hesitant to undo the enhanced google image option in WMT.
I have been sticking with the enahced image program and Google finally added about seven new images of mine this morining to their images index (all ranked in the top 20 for their keywords) and then Google removed them tonight! I don't get it.
I don't know how much longer I can stick with the enhanced option out of pure frustration.
How many images show if you turn off SafeSearch?
I have safe search completely turned off so that should not affect my results for now.
1. you see other sites in your site:domain.com search because others have hotlinks to your images.
2. "you see only see 10% of your images with moderate filter on" thats a Google problem, they cant figure out that those hotlinking sites is not part of yours, so if they write bad stuff, then you are done.
3. as the example with 8 images in google search, you will maybe not see anymore then that, only with filter off, be cause of googles bug.
Skip - The images have not returned :( There is something way off with my site and Google images.
Supplemental test:
-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com
If your pages meet the following non-supplementals test:
site:www.example.com/*
they are not supplemental and are more likely to have images indexed in the Google images database.
So work on the reasons for your pages being supplemental. Sites with lots of images and little text tend to have many supplemental pages (the Google Toolbar "gray bar" is your first hint).
Unfortunately as others have mentioned you must wait three months for your experiments to have results in the images database. For correcting supplemental problems it may take only one month for a page to become non-supplemental. So if you get a page out of the "supplemental" state, you will still probably have to wait two to three months before the images from that page will show up in the Google images database.
Finally long ago I had found if my web pages linked to a site the had pages that did not meet the Safe-Search criteria, then my pages would not meet the Safe-Search criteria either. By removing links to pages outside my site(s), after a month or so my pages would show up in safe search. Call it Guilt by Association.
An example: I linked to an electronics site with information about SEX, sex of male and female electronic connectors! Removed the link, now my page showed up in safe search (a month later at least).
Good luck, and unfortunately, you'll have to continue to be patient.
Quick question on possible supplemental problems, both dealing with title and meta descriptions. First, many of my pages are low rank and have no meta description. Others have indicated this is a "must do" on low rank pages. So I need to get on that. I take it I need to ingore the keyword meta and just focus on a good description.
For the title's, I may have a problem:
Let's say one of my pages on my site is correctly titled "Complete Location Name". Then, a secondary page is titled "Complete Location Name Activity". Would this cause problems with being placed in supplemental areas because both titles are using "Complete Location Name"?
Basicaly, what you are saying is that if I do a Google search for site:www.example.com/*, those are all non-supplemental pages. If so, that explains the problem.
[edited by: tedster at 5:06 am (utc) on April 26, 2009]
[edited by: Boulder90 at 5:57 am (utc) on April 26, 2009]
An individual page's Filename, Title, and Description, can and should be similar, using similar or identical keywords is OK, but the description should be one or two complete sentences, including punctuation (I believe). Longer Titles seem to be acceptable these days, but don't string keywords. If you can (while still making sense) put the most important keywords first in your Title.
Keywords Metatag: I just don't know about that one. I think Google does look at it, and maybe a page gets a "point" for taking the time to create one.
So the answer to this question:
Would this cause problems with being placed in supplemental areas because both titles are using "Complete Location Name"?
I have seen very compact pages with a single image rank well, but I can't figure out why? It could simply be inbound links, perhaps even hot links. I'm trying to get a page like this to rank now; but guess what? It's still supplemental!
The real gotcha these days is even though a page is supplemental it may be ranking well in the text search results for its keywords, but, again I'm fairly certain it will currently be barred from the Images results!
Finally I believe there is a "secret" for almost any page to rank well, even a page with no inbound links, but I'm not telling. Either way it takes a lot of work for the "secret" to succeed.
I think my main problem is I have absolutely no meta descriptions for my low ranked pages to distinguish them, even though they do offer totally unique content on each page. I am not sure about keywords yet. I think those were abused so badly it might hurt my site.
I find it really strange that having "complete location name" for one page, and then "complete location name area5" for a sub page on that same topic would harm a website in Google's eyes. Usually these pages have something to do with each other, and it's more organized for the user to have them titled as such.
[edited by: Boulder90 at 11:43 am (utc) on April 26, 2009]
I think:
[dmoz.org...]
is an example of what to do to make your pages supplemental. A example hopefully I'm allowed to link to!
Or you could say it's an example of what NOT to do! (To meet Google's requirements for a non-supplemental page!) It appears that about 93% of DMOZ'z pages are supplemental.
The Titles duplicate the sites folder structure, actually very organized from a user perspective, but it also looks just like a machine generated "Made For Adsense" (MFA) site. The paths and Titles have many duplicate keywords. The pages have no descriptions.
The largest human edited directory actually does not meet Google's criteria to be fully indexed! AOL only has 104,000 pages of DMOZ indexed (search site:www.dmoz.org), very close to the non-supplemental test for DMOZ:
site:www.dmoz.org/*
Of course why would Google want to index DMOZ? It really has no content. Come to think of it Google itself does not have that much content and it appears to be 93% supplemental! (As it should be!)
Try the supplemental test on Google:
-site:www.google.com/* site:www.google.com
You end up looking at a lot of weird query links, hmmm.
Try the test on www.example.com. It looks like example.com is trying to spam Google!
I think Google has decided they are doing Webmasters and the Internet a favor by leaving the supplemental test in place. It does make for unique pages.
Awesome information.
I have noticed when a page is transitioned from supplemental to non supplemental it may show up as both for a period. This might make the stats seem inconsistent.
If the pages on which your images are located are "Supplemental" or even "Gray barred" they will not show up in the Google images database.
This is incorrect.
I have many images that are on grey barred pages, but still show up in google image search. (6660 to 6890 images, depending when I look).
