Does Google Drop Pages from SERPs If They Rank in In-Page Image Search?

[levo]

Remember the issue, if you had integrated a video to your page, Google included your page as a video link in SERPs? [webmasterworld.com...]

They recently started to remove duplicate results from SERPs that also rank on other Google search products.

AFAIK, it started with Google News. Until a couple months ago, if you had a unique article that also made it to the Google News, it would be listed twice in SERPs, once for Google News - with a thumbnail, and once more as a normal search result link. Well that made sense, both listing used to have same title, and possibly same description.

Now, I think, they started to remove a normal search result link, if that page is included in Google Images results. It's hard to prove, because it seems to be random, and doesn't happen all the time, or maybe it happens to pages without enough rank/link juice to show up as both image and web result.

Are you seeing similar results?

[lucy24]

Could this be why my Impressions are going through the ceiling even as the Clicks vanish beneath the floor?

Do you mean Image Search as such, or do you mean that little string of images that they always shove into the middle of a regular search to entice you into Image Search? (And why would they want to? It's got less room for advertising.)

Poring over Top Searches in GWT I could only find one phrase that might reasonably show up on both sides. (For a given definition of "reasonably", at least.) So far it does-- but the image is a recent arrival. Another search should have shown up on the text side, but g### is apparently offended that I pulled the images and has banished me to... I dunno, somewhere below 30 at least.*

Hm. In the middle of the Image page is an "image not available". Not a last-minute deletion; the source is Google Books. Fancy that.

Oops, no, take that back. I thought of another rare but unambiguous search. (One word, which shows you just how rare it is.) On a different browser, not signed in, it's #2 in text and #1 in images. Still the same IP, of course.

I want to take a closer look at this one in a month or two, because I've only just blocked the Imagebot from a whole slew of directories.

But it may only apply to pages that get lots and lots of hits. Not worth applying another round of calculations to the less common searches.

Along the way, I found that the neat trick I just learned for disabling Preview doesn't seem to work for me :( There's probably a variable I didn't pick up.


* Instead they've bumped Project Gutenberg's version to the top of the list, followed by several dozen of its leading scrapers. Little do they know :snrk:

[levo]

Do you mean Image Search as such, or do you mean that little string of images that they always shove into the middle of a regular search to entice you into Image Search? (And why would they want to? It's got less room for advertising.)

Most of the time for SERPs with 'that little string of images.' At least that was my clue, sometimes the page just disappears from web results and some scrapper/feed reader etc. rank instead, without any image-results-in-web-results. As in one part of Google's algorithm just filters the page because it thinks that that page will be included as an image result on same page, but the other part just decides not to show image results..

I'm sure they've started some sort of duplicate filtering for web/news results. I'm not sure if they are extending this filtering to other integrated/extended search results. This might explain recent reports of random disappearances.. or it might be just a coincidence.

[lucy24]

Interesting. I wrote above

I thought of another rare but unambiguous search. (One word, which shows you just how rare it is.) On a different browser, not signed in, it's #2 in text and #1 in images. Still the same IP, of course.

In that particular search, there was no string of images in the middle of the text search-- and it wasn't for lack of pictures. I'll have to start paying attention :) If I ever hit a text-search with no pictures at all, will an image search show one or more of the same sites ranking highly both ways?

[HuskyPup]

Are you seeing similar results?

I've seen this for maybe two years, possibly longer. I noticed that for some keyword terms I would rank at the top for the normal SERPs and for others they would display 3/4/5 images, I would be #1 there and also on the image results' page.

Sometimes I am #1 in both however this week I have noticed that an Italian company that ripped my entire site and images a few years ago has suddenly started ranking for my images and occasionally in the regular SERPs.

The funniest thing about this is that what they are ranking for are exclusive widgets of mine therefore if they make any sales they'll still have to get them from me...win, win.