In Image Search - but for Images on Sites that I Link To!

[myrrh]

A group of pages on my site are appearing in Image Search results associated with images that do not appear on my site. The images that appear in the results are images those pages are linking to.

I want to understand why this would be happening so that I may take advantage of it with more pages. These pages do not always rank well for text search, but are ranking very well for image search.

Why would this be happening as opposed to the Image Search results linking to the original source (which in most cases are very highly ranked pages)?

[Lame_Wolf]

Are you hotlinking to the images ? or just linking to the page the image is on?

[myrrh]

I am not hotlinking - just linking to the page the image is on.

[myrrh]

I thought I'd give this question another go - thanks.

[tedster]

I'd say it's a bug on the Google Image Search backend, rather than anything the webmaster can fix on their own. I mentioned this problem to Matt Cutts at Pubcon Austin, and he understood that it can happen (although it's not his area).

I think the problem starts because so many high traffic sites serve images from a different hostname. That makes hotlinking a problem. So it gets more complicated trying to identify which image belongs to which "page" in the intuitive sense rather than the technical sense, and trying to account for this has created some serious knots in their code.