Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Despite of having optimised individual photos for google's image search, I don't get any traffic through it, nor do I rank well with my (IMHO high quality) pictures. Note that my website is the killer and king within its tiny niche when it comes to web-search.
So I was wondering if there was an active block of the kind of access which Google's image search required.
From my webhost, I know that the account was configured with hotlink protection disabled. Enabling hotlink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to specific file types on my website. When this feature is enabled, other sites will still be able to link to any file type that I don't specify.
An example of hotlinking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from my site from somewhere else on the net (e.g. from inside Google images search page). The end result of such linking is that the other site is stealing my bandwidth as people will be able to see my images without ever having to visit the website.
My webhost thought that this may explain why people are not arriving to my website from Google image searches, as hotlink protection on my website is disabled.
Have you made similar experiences? Is the hotlink protection the key to the riddle? What would you recommend me to do - is the risk of loosing bandwidth worse than additional traffic through Google's image search?
Do you have an image folder disallowed in robots.txt?
Personally and for my widgets, I see no advantage to allowing Google-Images. At one time (some 8-9 years ago) I did and there were thousands and thousands of requests for an image of a specific name without any benefit to my websites. The result was that my moving all images to specific image folders (excluded in robots.txt) and numbering my images rather than naming the images.
"Just add an exception in your hotlink lines to google based refers and the google domain."
How would I do that? I can manage hotlinks via a cPanel function.
As for the principle idea: My sites are in a market area where image-search driven traffic could well be desirable. That is essentially why I have uploaded extensive photo galleries.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:38 pm (utc) on May 28, 2009]
[edit reason] edited specifics [/edit]
[webmasterworld.com...]
more "hot-link" results at Webmaster World [google.com]
Blocking googlebot's requests for images would certainly hamper image search performance ;)
There's a reasonable argument that hotlinking makes it less likely that other people "reference" your images, and that this could harm performance. Google image search routinely lists images with hotlinkers as the URL on the results page. Perhaps the most relevant URL referencing an image is not necessarily the originator, as far as the image search algorithm goes.
That said, I've personally found many of the "universal search" features to be pretty basic in terms of selection criteria, and on the whole it's easier top rank in them than in organic web search results.
So there MUST be something that keeps Google actively away from my images. :(
The issue, I would think, would not be with the Googlebot finding the images and creating thumbnails, but G image search ultimately lets the user view the original full-sized image, using a link from the top area of the page, which is a Google framed page. So when you request the full image, the referrer is sent at that point and that's where hotlink protection would block the visitor from accessing your image.
So it could well be that either visitors are being blocked or possibly that G does a check to see whether an image is returned from the link they show at the top of their page in the upper frame, and if not, they won't list that image.
Back to the original question. I once got peeved and added hotlink protection and stopped G from caching images, but I experimented with being more open and have gotten some good traffic and several inbound links from image search. I assume the inbounds were b/c of image search because people were clearly looking for an image to link to from their blog. Sometimes they show a thumbnail and sometimes they don't. I'm sure there are people who are stealing my images and not linking, but I guess I just don't worry anymore.
BTW, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster *encourages* hotlinking and some huge percentage of their bandwidth is spent serving up hotlinked images, but it has hugely promoted their "brand" and driven massive sales of t-shirts and whatnot. So it's not necessarily a bad thing.
If you prevent people from hotlinking, all you're really doing is forcing them to download you image and then put the copy on their site. At that point you've lost all useful info. I'd generally rather have them hotlink.
PS - I entered a topic I'm interested in, but not an authority by any means, to test for this and lo and behold, I'm the #1 site for the search I did. I had no idea actually (which shows that it's not a high-traffic search. Still it was surprising). But then when I did the same search on the image search, I was nowhere on the first page.
Conversely, I've ranked for things in image search that I don't rank for at all in regular search and those have brought in some traffic. So I think it's worth it to "participate" in image search rather than nocache and block hotlinks.
Finally, I have gotten some of my images published in print as a result of getting them out there widely. I even sold one to National Geographic, which was not via image search, but I don't think it would have happened without having a relatively open policy on images. The money was crap, but it has given me great pleasure to show to friends.
If these observations are correct (and they seem to be, at least in some cases), that kind of hotlinking might hurt your image search performance rather than help it.
So I guess it would depend to some degree on what type of images you have. Since few of my images include actual human beings, I don't worry much about that sort of hotlinking.
Very few webmasters study Image Search at all, and even fewer watch closely - so the details are just not uncovered to any great degree.
As a site owner... I just did a site: search on an image-heavy site. I would say that the selection of photos chosen (233 in all) is good to very good and the text chosen to go with them is excellent.
Actually, it's kind of a fun way to view my pics. I've never actually tried a site: search on image search before.
JohnMu: ...apart from the fact that many sites host their images elsewhere...sometimes a different page is more relevant than your page for the keywords the person was searching for. For example, if someone searches for "beach photo" and your awesome vacation sunset picture happens to match, but your own page does not mention "beach photo" (or otherwise does not appear to be relevant for "beach photo") it's possible that we'll link to some other site that does mention "beach photo" together with your image.This can be particularly problematic for gallery scripts, eg when your own site uses "DSC_02102.JPG" as the title and as the only unique text on the landing page....
So.. if you see that your own images are not ranking with content from your site, I'd recommend taking that as a challenge and working to make sure that your own pages are as relevant as they can be, with your images.
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