Now I'm Really Confused With Images!

[HuskyPup]

As many of you know I lost tens of thousands of images from Google at the beginning of October yet their actual pages retained their #1 SERPs rankings.

On Dec 8th 2010 I created a new Coppermine Gallery on one keyword domain name site, ALL of these pages have been spidered and in the regular SERPs, not one image from that site is in the image site: operator results, not even the company logo.gif.

Is anyone else seeing such bizarre behaviour?

[goodroi]

i always felt the google image algo was bizarre :)

i have not had a similar experience but i am also not heavy into image search

[jbinbpt]

It's my understanding that the images are indexed in relationship to the text that is near the image. It also depends on the title and alt tag associated with the image.

[HuskyPup]

It's my understanding that the images are indexed in relationship to the text that is near the image. It also depends on the title and alt tag associated with the image.

Yep, my images have all the necessary, I'm also talking about seriously weird things like in Google search preview when some regular pages show all the images including AdSense and other pages do not show a thing, not even the company logo.

It makes me wonder if something is badly broken since they do not seem to know what they have themselves.

It's not just me, I have competitors asking me what's happened since many of their images have also disappeared meanwhile my images are appearing on some very strangely addressed sites with no alt, no title, no product description etc, the only thing is a copy of my image with the keyword image name which makes a mockery of all my work and the supposedly correct W3C way to do it.

[vision82]

Very strange, but the google image alg is very slow to index the image...
Have you try to create a XML image sitemap?

[Demaestro]

Do you have visits from googlebot-image?

[tedster]

i always felt the google image algo was bizarre

Yes, I agree. As an end user I noticed many changes this past year, and much for the better. I commonly use image search for inspiration - visual ideas for how to depict various concepts. this year, the results have become dramatically more useful to me, with irrelevant images much less common.

What I think may be happening is this. Even more than with the text search algo, Image Search crawling and indexing cares almost nothing for the webmaster. It's now almost totally focused on the end user. The fact that the site: operator is set up at all is almost an anomaly.

When I get the time, I hope to study image search more from this angle. For now, I'd bet these drastic changes that Husky is reporting are linked into this more intensive focus on the end user and the types of purposes that bring users there. There's probably a taxonomy established for these purpose - especially a taxonomy of query types.

Husky, have you been watching the query terms that brought you image traffic in the past? I'm also wondering if you watch any stat like "images indexed versus clickthrough traffic from Google"

[Brett_Tabke]

Was this an adult site? It is almost always adult site operators who are sensitive to image changes.

[HuskyPup]

Nice one Brett:-)

Specialist construction products...now how am I going to get a joke out of that...get your hard hats on?

Yesterday I removed some of the blocked IP addresses I have in CPanel to see if that makes any difference, I can't see why it would but one never knows with Google.

[bumpski]

Huskypup

Have you done the supplemental test?
[webmasterworld.com...]

-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com

If your pages have gone supplemental the images from those pages will not be indexed by Google Images.

Hopefully this is one step toward researching your problem. Of course it would have been very useful to know the results of this test before your problem began, but at least it can be helpful in researching the problem.

[indyank]

the only thing is a copy of my image with the keyword image name which makes a mockery of all my work and the supposedly correct W3C way to do it.

Husky, are all your images getting indexed for the scraper site? If yes, the only suspect could be the image name not matching your alt tag, assuming you are not using a keyword image name.

[HuskyPup]

-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com

Zero, denada, zilch, nothing but here's a funny one for you if I do site:www.example.com/ I get 1 more image than site:www.example.com

are all your images getting indexed for the scraper site?

I wouldn't call them scraper sites, they are trade sites which have copied some of my images and serving themselves however they are strange names with a mix of numbers usually and guess what, I can't find one now!

For the regular SERPs everything is fine however I'm puzzled why G is indexing images from some of my sites and not others. A site I launched in November has every page indexed and ranking well, the entire Coppermine gallery is indexed yet not ONE image from the entire site seemingly is not in the index yet when I do a site preview all the images in the Coppermine gallery seem to be there yet the regular pages have some pages with images and some are missing!

Another site from July time had everything indexed almost immediately and all are #1 in the regular and image SERPs however subsequent image additions have not been added to the image results but are fine in the regular results.

Bear in mind I've changed nothing on my sites other than add CPanel Hot Link Protection with Google allowed and IP Deny. I have actually disabled these on one site to see if it is CPanel causing the problem.

This all seems to have something to do with me clamping down on hotlinkers, the sites have not changed however I stopped tens of thousands of images seekers and hotlinkers virtually overnight and then Google dropped loads of my images but not all.

I'm seriously considering testing with another host to see if that makes any difference whatsoever.

[HuskyPup]

Does anyone feel that this could be a deliberate rotation of images by Google?

Maybe they have thought "Right, we know the sites that are really good at optimising pages with images etc, we'll leave a certain proportion of their images in the index however let's give some of the others an opportunity, after all, these sites are already #1 in the regular SERPs."

I know this doesn't seem to make sense since my Google previews are inconsistent and some sites have nothing indexed at all however the actual image results do seem to be rotating except when one of my images is there and it's firmly at #1.

It's just totally bizarre that after 10 years so many images were removed when I've done nothing EXCEPT clamp down on hotlinkers.

[bumpski]

But Google images are hot linked, so I think you might want to turn off your hot link filter. Something must be set up wrong. As much as I dislike hot linkers I've never enabled "prevent hot linkers".
If you use "frame buster" javascript your images won't show up in yahoo images. (At least this was true a few years ago.)

Of course another thing to experiment with is how many of your images show up in safe search.

I found one page of one of my sites didn't have images in safe search but they were there otherwise. This particular page linked to an electronics site, to a page that talked about male and female sex! Sex of electronic connectors that is. I removed this outbound link to a legitimate site and in about 3 or 4 months "poof" my images from this page were back in the "Safe search" results.

[indyank]

Husky, still I haven't got it from you on whether the alt tag and imager name are the same on your site.My assumption was they weren't and you use some identifier to name your images, while the other site uses keyword to name them.

Next, the hotlink protection seems interesting...may be google has changed here... but it all speculation from my end..as google could easily determine the source of the image, they built in an algorithm to rank images that get hotlinked more...now that you restrict the hotlinks you might have lost out...

Most importantly, I am assuming that all are images that you own and are not picked out from elsewhere on the web...

[tangor]

I've denied G access to my images for several years. Makes no difference... they keep showing them (hotlinked from their results page). And I can't get them to quit.

Well, not precisely true. I experimented over a 4 week period of robots.txt and .htaccess deny/disallow for big g... and finally had some silence. Also lost near 65% incoming. These days I stick to:

Disallow: *.gif$
Disallow: *.jpg$

...for Google and use .htaccess to 404 google-image

Image theft (I see things differently than most) is now less than 2%. No loss in ordinary traffic, so that works for me!

[indyank]

tangor, you are trying to completely get away from G for images while Husky wants to be included and his concern is he is not ranking well for his images in G...

[tangor]

This true, indyank, just letting all and sundry know that even IF DISALLOWED g finds the images and sucks it up then, by machinations we have yet to fathom, makes only the BEST of those disallowed images known. Pick one way, shoot in foot. Pick other way, shoot in other foot. There is no rhyme or reason with Google images, not for the last two years at any rate. But I do freely allow that images are 10% of my site(s) and are mere illustrations, not artifacts for sale. Completely different reason for disallowing images...

PS: I've seen no drop in Google after my images... hence my first reply and this one... no explanation why thousands of images lost in G Index... just moaning THAT has not happened for me...

[HuskyPup]

Husky, still I haven't got it from you on whether the alt tag and imager name are the same on your site.My assumption was they weren't and you use some identifier to name your images, while the other site uses keyword to name them.

Every image was personally scanned by me, every image is identified with alt and title, the image is also named correctly as the product, no abbreviations, no hexadecimal, titlebar, h1 and h2 all correctly named.

My copied images on other sites are usually just the image name, nothing else.

Husky wants to be included and his concern is he is not ranking well for his images in G...

Nope, I am either #1 or not there at all, period, both my biggest sites have about 10% of their images in the index now, some of my smaller sites have as many as 90% and some have 0% whereas in the regular SERPs I am still there mostly at #1.

All this happened on the weekend of 2nd/3rd October across all sites.

[HuskyPup]

I just had a thought about a small site I started over Xmas which I'm about to get around to developing, this site has NO Hotlink Protection nor any IP Deny enabled in CPanel and, you've guessed it, every image is indexed.

Oh heck, it looks like I'm going to have to have an experiment and see what happens...bang goes my bandwidth again!

[HuskyPup]

Aha...I appear to have some success!

I consulted with an htaccess expert last week and he slightly modified my hotlink protection so I'm trying it out on a few sites.

The first success was when my main B&M site's images started to appear in the Google preview pane a couple of days ago.

The second success was a full spidering of my trade directory site yesterday by Google with an immediate increase in the quantity of images in the image results.

Fingers crossed they're on their way back in however the big lesson seems to be that CPanel's hotlink protection is just TOO severe and locked everyone out!

[tedster]

I love to hear good news - thanks and let's hope you got it fixed for good.

[bumpski]

Congratulations!

I really don't trust my web host to actually modify this file. Of course they can do anything they want with .conf file. (And they've really been sticking it to me lately.) If only I had an economical high bandwidth link I'd drop them.

[HuskyPup]

Further to my last post I can confirm, insofar as my trade directory site is concerned, that about 2,000 images have been added back into to the image SERPs this past week. Only another NN,000 or so to go!

As yet my B&M sites have not yet seen any substantial increases however a couple of sites that did not have ANY images shown whatsoever have actually got a couple there now...hopefully I reckon I'm on the right track.

And purely by coincidence it's interesting to note that as my images seem to be retuning that my AdSense earnings are returning to their normal levels.

Did I possibly get penalised in AdSense by accidentally not allowing Google in?

[tedster]

When Google finds what it thinks are organic spam issues that can affect Adsense membership - but as far as I know the site just gets kicked out of the program if action is taken, not depressed. I also don't think that the connection is automated.

Did you see that Google now has a Webmaster Forum for Image Search [google.com]? I'm hoping to at least monitor the Q&A in there from time to time, to get some more official input about how Images work.

[HuskyPup]

Sometime overnight my main B&M site doubled its images and the main directory site added another 2,000+ images...we're getting there:-)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google images is a different search engine for the most part and not on the same schedule as web results.