Possible ranking benefit to using scaled images instead of thumbnails

[JS_Harris]

I was just browsing some pictures in Google's image search feature and came across a few instances of a single site ranking 6-8 images per search term on the first page of the results (18 results/page).

Curious I clicked through to see what was special about the site to be ranking so well in image search and I found all of the images are just tiny little things, all 15x15, and next to a "similar articles" section in the sidebar.

There are no pictures on any page other than these tiny little images next to links pointing at other articles and clicking on the images takes you to a the articles, not an enlarged version of the images. All images are full sized but they appear small due to width and height being specified as 15x15.

In Google they appear with full size dimensions (in appearance and description) but on site you can't reach the full size version via any link or page whatsoever.

The images are apparently added to each article in the same way you specify keywords or meta tags and in some cases the image even appears random as if it doesn't belong to the article it's attached to.

So, would this be considered a benefit to NOT using images formatted properly to save bandwidth? Every page has 6 images to rank but the site really displays no images at all, they're too small to make out much detail.

[tedster]

That's a very interesting find. I'll keep an eye out for anything similar.

...would this be considered a benefit to NOT using images formatted properly to save bandwidth?

Trading off a bandwidth savings for an Image Search gain. I guess that would all depend on the specific site and whether it can make good use of Image Search traffic.

[JS_Harris]

My concern would be that the images do not technically belong to the page they are credited to in Google image search despite being on them, sort of, and some visitors may become frustrated when they see a brand x widget image and land on a brand y widget page.

It feels too borderline to embrace without an official response from Google. Having 6-8 of the top 18 spots in Google is currently possible and would be nice but is adding images in this manner, which admittedly does help visitors a little, asking for trouble... the million dollar question.

Bandwidth savings seems like a reasonable trade-off though page load time would need monitoring.