Image Search Traffic dropped in Sept 2008 and stayed that way

[snowfore]

Hi

We were wondering how much traffic is generated through hits on images hosted at our website via Google Image search.

Looking at our stats for 3 of our websites we noticed that the answer was a significant amount. Anyway, the point is that in mid-September 2008 our referrals from image searches dropped by about 2/3 and stayed low until the present day.

Has anyone else seen this, or got any ideas why?

[edited by: tedster at 8:12 am (utc) on June 9, 2009]

[tangor]

I'm the wrong guy to reply... I view a DROP in image search as a GOOD THING. :)

Content is the goodie, but there are a few nifty keen pics, too... and all disallowed but they seem to find 'em anyway.

That personal opinion out of the way, are your images a significant leader to your site? Are they leisure/fun/dollars? If so, the financial meltdown worldwide might account for some drop in inbounds.

[snowfore]

tangor, we found that incoming traffic lead to around 2-3 pageviews so it clearly was a way of getting new visitors to our site.

They are mainly location maps so not critical to $

[tangor]

If you get an inbound from an outside image (google map for example) that's a good thing if it matches content. You didn't have to generate the image or pay the bandwidth that's cool. If it a search for an image on your site and not your content (and all the user was interested in was the image and they got it and didn't stay to see what other goodies you have) you lost. Others will say different and I have no quarrel in that regard. Any 2-3 views is grand. I generally go for 2k-3k (or way more) for the content instead of images.

[piney]

Could the change be related to Google's implementation of the drop-down options (ie "any content," "photo content," "line drawings," etc)? One of my sites has realistic illustrations. With the implementation of the drop-down options, the illustrations are often excluded from the "photo content" listings. And they aren't "line art". It looks like some (black & white) maps are considered to be "line art" although I would not intuitively look for them there.