Google Image Search Busts Frame Busters?

[levo]

Did Google just started busting frame busters? I've double checked my code, but it doesn't work for Google Images now.

[dhaliwal]

yes, we need to find out some way to bust the framing of content by google images.

[matrix_jan]

Update:

Now I see the following when the page tries frame-bust:

Redirect Notice
The previous page is sending you to [pageurl]

G is desperate...

[tangor]

Take away the candy and the candyman has to find a different way to dispense it... else lose access to the candy altogether. Webmasters really need to take a look at how they do biz... and understand there's more freetards on the planet than insects (or it seems that way!).

[DeeCee]

I have said it before, and I'll say it again.
Google is the largest content scraper in the world, and they don't care that the content is being abused and stolen. Images especially.

They have one thing in mind. Keep the users eyes as long as possible on the Google site, where they potentially click on ads. Google has NO interest, financial or otherwise, in sending users to actual web-sites unless they absolutely have to, or if they clicked on a paid ad.

By allowing Google to steal all images, one is in effect saying that it is OK to steal.

Also, as I mentioned, watch your logs.. Visitors that arrive from the Google image search behave differently IF they ever get to your site. They might look like visitors, but not all visitors are created equally.

First, the keywords they arrive on match the image, not your article text. That tells you what their real interest is.

Secondly, they do not move as do other users. They obviously landed on your site, merely to do a right-click if the image is good enough. Arrived merely to steal an image.

By busting frames and similar, Google is accomplishing again the same. If they have your real (full-size) image, the user can steal it directly from there. No need to even visit your site. And again, it keeps users on the ad-filled Google site longer.

All in all, good statistics for Google. They are not in the business of helping visitors find content as a "search engine" anymore. They are in the business of being traffic cop, making sure that users click on as many ads as possible, to deliver PAID traffic to the sites that can afford it.

The only time Google still acts as a search engine is when you search for very technical topics. Less ad-relevance there. But instead, they show a million copy-sites where people have duplicated Unix man-pages, wordpress/joomla/.... PHPDoc type content onto the Internet to "create content", with no value add. No effort on Google's behalf to skim off the junk sites. Instead you must wade through all the crud-sites manually.

And the more friendly web-site owners are, the better for Google. Just watch their current stock-price. Up around 30% over the past months. Soon almost back up to the $700 level again. All the Google preview, frame-busting, and other "keep people on Google" is working. And it will keep working until we all say NO.

[ken_b]

Update:

Now I see the following when the page tries frame-bust:

Redirect Notice
The previous page is sending you to [pageurl]

Where are you seeing this notice on the screen?

I'm not seeing it, but maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

[Lame_Wolf]

Where are you seeing this notice on the screen?

I'm not seeing it, but maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

I sometimes see it in Image Search.

[matrix_jan]

ken_b,

When I do the site: search and narrow the results to 24hr, then on the left side tab(attention not the top tab) click images, G shows images that were indexed in last 24hr...
So far I've noticed the redirect notice for some of those recently indexed pages...

[matrix_jan]

Another update:

For "more sizes" results the frame bust works perfectly.

[dhaliwal]

how can you bust frames for "more sizes" ?
i think that page resides on google ?

Or you mean that if people come by clicking on more sizes from google images, the frame buster isn't active on that kind of referral ?

[matrix_jan]

dhaliwal,

I think my message was nothing else than that by clicking on one of the results in "more sizes" results page the frame busting(frame breaking, my page loading up instantly) works fine.

Frame buster isn't active in normal serp-s, so I posted where it is still active.

[uploadeur]

We need to find a tirck for this issue, because Chrome users is getting bigger.

So any solution?

[websrch]

Google has crossed the line of fair use long ago. Ie; expanding images equals less click though and now sandbox with full size images to protect users. The reality is to keep people in Googlesphere.

Were all in a catch22 that we rely on G for traffic but at the same time their interests are to become more and more a portal like yahoo. A closed system and the bosses are saying monetize them on exit. It will only become more difficult to get free traffic from Google going forward.

If a class action lawsuit were to ever happen I'd love to pull out some of my data I've been storing and share it till then or we begin paying for traffic...

[ken_b]

Back on 12/8/2011 when this thread was fairly new I "disallowed" my image folders in my robots.txt file.

Just now Bing/hoo shows no images for my site from those folders.

Google still shows about 2,500.

[DeeCee]

Everything Google develops these days seem designed purely to steal visitors from real web-sites using our own content, and to keep users as long as possible around the ads on the Google search pages. If one want to increase visitors the only sure way is toe pay Google for traffic by bidding through ad-words.

Image search and frame-busting, Google Preview with extracted snippets. All designed to have our servers serve up content to Google's users, but only on Google's own site and keeping users near their local ad-revenue. It is getting close to Google ending up being no different from all the other content-scraper bots I block out every day. They behave worse than the multiple Chinese, Korean, and German bots I added to block-lists just today.

I already cut Google off image theft, and am seriously considering disallowing Google preview.
I get an endless amount of traffic trucking through Google Preview everyday, especially on one site that shows technical info. But Google showing the full page with text overlays with the essential paragraphs extracted and available for reading directly on Google, many of the previews stay close to the Google ads.

Even worse, since Google Preview loads everything (full page load, CSS, images, ..) including even Google's own ads if present, each preview visit means both a full "user-load" and immediately separate visits from the Google Ads-Bot scanner checking for keywords. 2-3 separate loads of the same dynamic database information, just to serve up content for Google so they can show more ads on their own site.

Google is currently the largest content scraper/thief in the world. It used to be a "good" scraper. Designed to send traffic back to site owners at a reasonable pace. Paying back for the service of letting them lift content off our sites.
But a content scraper that delivers no service back to the site-owner and trying with all its might and technology to keep users on the scraper's own site falls into the bad scraper category and will get more and more banned. So in the end Google is starting a bad spiral making themselves more worthless. The more content gets excluded from Google, because Google does not "pay back" the content owners with visitors, the less value their search engine will have to the same users they are stealing from us. Plus, the more theft from Google, the more opportunity they open for alternate search engines.

Very short-term thinking on Google's behalf. They should not be biting the hands that feed them. We might just choose to feed someone elses attempt on making a search engine instead.

Eventually, only the junk and duplicate content would be available in Google, if they do not correct their ways and realize that no site owner give content to Google because they love Google. We allow the content-theft purely because we hope for human visitors to be sent back the the ACTUAL site. Without our content, Google no longer have a search engine.

Right now there is a secondary problem in that when Google suddenly send less visitors, we all first think we did something wrong, and assume we should redo all our SEO to fit some new Google algo change. We assume "Panda did it to me". Rather than realizing that it is more and more merely Google keeping the web-users for themselves.

[Web_speed]

@DeeCee

Spot on!

Don't you just love the great names they keep coming out with for all them smoke and mirrors.... panda, shmanda, above the fold algo, below the fold algo, bi-daily entire web index updates.... and the list goes on and on...

A lost search engine down a slippery slop. Thats what I call it.

[DeeCee]

Web_Speed,
Yes, exactly.. They keep coming up with more and more fanciful names for obscure algo changes, for which no real detail is released to keep us all guessing and blaming ourselves for the visitor counts going down. Designed for web-site owners to keep guessing how to redesign their sites to fit Google's preference for the 100'th time. And when asking Google what the problem could be, one gets absolutely no answer other than silence. While the real, larger problem is Google's content-theft and visitor theft. Which will eventually kill Google's search engine business if they do not change their ways. No visitors will go to a search engine that in the end will serve up only junk-sites, because it end up being blocked from stealing content on the better sites.
We all see that already. Search for some of your own content (or even content from this site), and you will often find that the scraper sites rank higher than the real content owners, because the thieves often present a more varied cross-section of "new" content, stolen from across many sites. And Google's algo's are too dumb to realize that all this varied content these sites serve up is simply stolen from the smaller, real content producers Google then shove down on lower pages.

In the end, this is all a search engine is, both technically and logically: A Content Scraper, or content thief, that happens to index the stolen content. Different from all the other content scrapers ONLY in one regard: a search engine is supposed to present only a taste of content, and then send visitors to the real content site, and not invent methods to keep the users for its own ad-serving purpose. We allow content theft by search engines only as long as they send us visitors. Their method of payment for content.

If a search engine suddenly like Google appears to be keeping users away from the real sites, it is then absolutely no different from the thieves that steal content and post it on their own blogs to serve up ads.

There are honestly days where I prefer the ordinary "bad" content scrapers I "serve" every day. At least they do not pretend to be "helping me" while visiting me from 1-2 times per second 24 hours a day. They at least TRY to hide their bad ways.

[Planet13]

Well, while we are all waiting for a technical solution, I guess the next best thing is to:

Put adsense on the pages where google is stealing the image.

Then maybe if we complain enough to adsense that google's use of our images is costing adsense significant amounts of lost revenue, then maybe they will be able to get google search to change its ways.

In the end, I think that google search is going to just monetize the image results with ADWORDS, so they aren't going to care how much they hurt adsense.

BTW: I know that cloaking is a violation of the terms of service, but has anyone tried any form of cloaking where they serve up a modified image to google images that maybe has parts of the image obscured? Then you could have text on that obscured part of the image with instruction on how to see the full image on your site?

[websrch]

Google would rather monetize them on their properties rather than yours so this strategy wouldn't work. I've spoke with our personal adsense rep and they have so little control and of lately so much chure in the staffing that it seems junior G people start in Adsense and then move into other parts of the company as they grow their skillset.

[ken_b]

I posted this on Saturday 2/4/12.

Back on 12/8/2011 when this thread was fairly new I "disallowed" my image folders in my robots.txt file.

Just now Bing/hoo shows no images for my site from those folders.

Google still shows about 2,500.

Google was busy yesterday, today, 2/6/12, the image count for my site is down to 620.

[DeeCee]

websrch,

Your statement below seems to confirm what I stated earlier. That Big G. is concentrating on ads on their properties, and with general Adsense (on our properties) getting lower and less qualified attention, that tells us where they are and where they are planning to go. They keep the visitors as long as possible for themselves (using our content), and converts on their own. Big G. is close on the way to translate their "search engine" into merely a sales vehicle, using our scraped content to get users to view ads on THEIR sites (ads we also pay for through bidding against each other). This use by Google fits the purest definition of a "bad, bad content scraper".

They believe that they now "own" the Internet, and the content on it and can abuse and mistreat site- and content owners any way they like because we (in our own minds) depend on Big G.

The trend will not turn, until site owners start using alternate traffic generation vehicles, and disallow Google from scraping content, like we do with other scrapers that do not pay back for content use. If some major good content providers cut them off, Google's machine will become increasingly worthless to their users, and they will have to return more to their roots (or their other businesses, such as becoming a cell-phone company. :) ).

Google would rather monetize them on their properties rather than yours so this strategy wouldn't work. I've spoke with our personal adsense rep and they have so little control and of lately so much chure in the staffing that it seems junior G people start in Adsense and then move into other parts of the company as they grow their skillset.

[websrch]

DeeCee

I would agree with your points than were not at the point to cut the cord. Revenue still comes in just not nearly as much. Our profit declined by 67% last quarter. With 80% of traffic a result of Google where do you think that money that revenue went?

[DeeCee]

websrch,
I think most (including me) agree with you that we have hard time cutting off Google. Mostly because they currently have the power of "owning" the web-users. But they have the web-users only for a small part because of what Google have done, but largely because they have OUR content. Almost no users come to the Google search engine to look at Google owned content.

All of us (including myself) need to learn to diversify our traffic more, spend more money on learning how to drive traffic from Facebook and other places where the users hang out. Then we can cut off Google from one piece of our content (and our revenue) at a time. Cutting off Google does not necessarily means an immediate robots.txt block on a whole site (I actually have several that are entirely blocked for Google). Blocking Google off image theft is a start, then certain content categories, just to gauge impact; and so on. But notice, that the more content is blocked for Google (overall), the less the impact will become. Because users will start searching for content somewhere else eventually, as Google's search value decrease.

Notice that this "dilution of data value" argument works on other things.
I have a plugin (currently for Wordpress) I use for blocking not only Blog spammers but also Info tracker bots, Mark scanner bots, and other irritating bots crawling around. As more and more sites block these types of scrapers from sucking on the services we pay for, the services they sell themselves will also be heavily diluted. Who, for example, would want to pay thousands of dollars per year for the service of a Mark scanner/monitoring company, if their scanning only had a 50/50 or less chance of showing results as sites becomes off-limits to them. They are already breaking many US States "hacking" laws against unauthorized access. Why? Because we are not taking control and stopping them.

Thanks for the numbers. That should put an actual size to the problem for most of us. A size to how Google is siphoning off both visitors, revenue, and profits from content owners. First by lifting our content to entice people onto THEIR site, and second by making us (or product sellers in general) pay and fight over the actual advertising spots they place next to the appropriated content on Google properties. Saving Google from having to pay the revenue share they would otherwise have to give up, if the Adsense ad was instead shown on our sites.

[dhaliwal]

WebmasterWorld is a community of very intelligent and influential webmasters.

I would be happy, if webmasters having high traffic websites, join hands and promote some other search engine that will be webmaster as well as user friendly.

Google is simply trying to make too much money and keep visitors to itself. And, they are also scraping content. They won't feel any pain if 1-2 webmasters stop them. But, they will see the difference, if thousands of webmasters block them from stealing content from websites.

[websrch]

Cuil? Seriously from my perspective is Google won the war on search. Facebook won the war on social, whats next?

[matrix_jan]

But, they will see the difference, if thousands of webmasters block them from stealing content from websites.

Block google and see competitors bloom? There are websites that rely mainly on G-image traffic. It would be better to file some kind of petition. There must be some kind of organization that protects webmasters' rights. What G does is pull images out of our websites and serve them without any content to the public, with some little reward... ...say maybe the users will visit you website too sometimes.

My websites count total 1M+ indexed images, all high-res, you do the math how this thing impacts my websites. I sort of work as a hosting company for google images... oh you want this one hah? go ahead, which size do you want, no no need to visit my website eat the traffic and download it through the link... I'll work hard and bring even better ones on you next visit...

[websrch]

matrix_jan, i like your thinking but fear that pissing G off may just result in a response like ok we'll just remove the images have any problem now?

I think some big media players would need to step up and then we join in on the bandwagon. If someone were to address this as a copyright issue and them framing fullsize images I think that would be the most effective path.

[tedster]

Folks, WebmasterWorld is not online to organize or create any calls to actions for any company, not even Google:

26... calls to action against any company or person will be removed.
Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]

you see, we just don't do that. So I think this thread is done - thanks for the inputs.