Images not indexed by Google - possible reasons?

[Pretty Polly]

In my CMS all images are stored in a central library.

On the website images are referenced using the following path:

src="/assets/x/50124/w160", where

50124 - is a unique ID of the image in the library,
w160 - is a width for image re-sizing.

Site - < edited - see Google Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] >

Search for "site:www.example.net" in Google Images does not return anything. (In fact, it does return a few cached images from the old website, and not the new website).

Does anybody have any suggestions why my images aren't getting indexed by Google Image SERPS?

[edited by: tedster at 7:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2009]

[tedster]

Hello Polly and welcome to the forums.

There are many mysteries about Google Image Search. It's certain that Google is not nearly as thorough in indexing images as they are in indexing other kinds of urls. One of the problem areas is a super sensitive Safe Search filter, that can cause many images to be filtered out of the results unless you intentionally go into your preferences and set Safe Search to "Do not filter my search results." By default it's set to "Use moderate filtering."

Another issue is that image search is only updated a few times a year. There currently appears to be some kind of Image Search update in progress but not complete - we're discussing that here: [webmasterworld.com...]