Google image trap and its effects on rankings

[cupid]

does anyone her use a google image trap? i.e. in google images, when user clicks on the thumb, he gets the website instead of it being greyed out in the background.
do you know if google frowns upon this and will it negatively affect image rankings?
tks

[Shatner]

I doubt they frown on it since lately 50% of the sites I come across in Google Image Search use it, while my site doesn't and it never ranks for anything in Image Search.

[LunaC]

I use a frame break one 1 site and haven't seen a loss in google images. That site is an image archive, so lots of image search traffic.

That said, even with the frame break that traffic rarely converts, the ctr for ads is abysmally low and bounce rate is high. I've removed the frame break and added it back a few times to test in the last few months and haven't seen any real difference in income or bounce either way.

The only real reason I use it is that the way google image search presents the images it encourages hotlinking and just feels like a big slap in the face. Breaking the frame may or may not help, but it makes me feel a little bit better.

I should also mention that breaking the frame can interfere with referrer stats (gathered with javascript) in some cases, so if you do see a drop in referals, check for that against your server logs.