Big Image Update at Google

[zeus]

Once again a image update, Panda had did much harm to google image, but this update flips everything up and down, all sites at the top are blogs like sites, so mostly not sites that focus on image only. Maybe its now the sites that ranked good there, that gets hit to scare small sites, like on google.com

[HuskyPup]

Hi zeus, this all started with Panda 2.1 May 6th 2011.

This specific Coppermine Gallery was the only part of any of my sites to be hit and since then it has been hit several times, twice this month alone.

I have been told other Coppermine users have had similar issues however I've never had the opportunity to discuss this with them.

I agree that there must be a problem but precisely what I haven't a clue other than it's a Google hatred of Coppermine!

[Rasputin]

Bit of a long shot discovery but might help someone with images traffic so I'll mention it...

I just found out that my robots.txt is now disallowing /images/ after years of allowing it, although I hadn't changed the file myself - turns out that upgrading a joomla site to 2.5.7 using Admin Tools reinserts the standard Joomla 'disallow images' back into robots.txt without mentioning it. Less than ideal!

So if you have a gallery as part of a joomla site it would be worth checking whether images are still allowed.

[zeus]

HuskyPup - the basic,
1. have you tried with filter of,
2. site:yourdomain.comimage search
3. check robots.txt
4. htaccess

bounce rate for your end image, where a larger version of your images are, is about 82% am i right and most visits came to those end images?, that was the reason why I changed my whole site, be cause I thought that would be a panda issue with this bi bounce rate.

[HuskyPup]

Robots and htaccess fine.

I've spent several hours last night and this morning checking images, what's ranking, what's not etc.

The interesting thing is that many images are still ranking extremely well yet some are not ranking whatsoever and there seems to be three main reasons for this with a kicker at #4:

1. A new image scraper site ranking well called fly2pic which is even used on pinterest.

2. A new Chinese directory site selling everything with scraped images and information but yet only a few months old.

3. Google's got its knickers in a twist! For instance, in image search, if I enter keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 it will usually display a few of the correct images but after that anything could happen, I may get keyword4 keyword2 keyword3 or keyword1 keyword5 keyword3 or even some other keywords but nearly always it gets keyword3 correct.

When using "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" it does get a bit better but still not as good as it used to be.

4. HOWEVER, and here's what I do not understand at all as yet, when I do a site:search each of the 12 albums have been capped at 278 results each! That's right, precisely 278 whereas every album has a different number of images.

Any ideas as to what may have caused this anyone?

I'm going to go through every Coppermine setting there is even though I know I've changed absolutely nothing.

[zeus]

I noticed with the last image update "which I say again suck big time" that sites which links to images rank high then those site who host the image which I think its a big mistake. Also when I do a image search and type in my domain and a keyword I dont get a single image from my site,thats also new with this sep update.

[HuskyPup]

I cannot find anything wrong at my end therefore I'm changing my robots.txt since I did block Google from crawling a specific url because Google kept showing it in the SERPs even though there was nothing there.

There used to be something there a couple of years ago, the interesting thing is that Coppermine does not show a 404 page, in this instance in the titlebar it states Error Page and on the page "The selected album/file does not exist !".

I need to check precisely when I uploaded the robots.txt to see if it coincides with May 6th 2011. This is the only alteration I'm making for the moment otherwise if/when the images come back I don't need to have several changes to be considered.

[HuskyPup]

Slowly and steadily day by day my Coppermine Gallery has gone back to where it was before last weekend...wierd!

[diberry]

Great news, HuskyPup! Wish we had some idea why, but at least it's good new, LOL!