Google Images' New (Bing-like) Layout

[levo]

Clicking on images now opens a layer with the larger image and a link to the page.

[img844.imageshack.us...]

[gbk666]

"For example with this new image change I am trying a new experiment with some high res images. Having a larger preview image should make it easier to attract click-throughs for these higher res images. "

Good luck but it won't work.

Times have changed, not the other webmasters are our main competition... google is. And as long as dont have a international lobby we are easy fodder for big G.

[driller41]

It was mentioned before, but the only thing we can do and really should do is to have multiple image folders, one for thumbs and one for the bigger images and maybe add watermarks to the smaller images + clear words that the big images can be found on site xx

It is worth a try - perhaps adding text over the image such as 'did you know that...' and add something related to your site, something to entice a click through - you have the viewers undivided attention with the current google system as they are only displaying the one image - and it will piŁ$ google off which is good :)

The problem is you would have to serve these promotional images to google and bing and keep them from your proper images.

[zeus]

There must be a way that they only show there cached little image, which I did before this change, then I blocked them with hotlinking. On Bing I have another system, so they just show a little image, but it dont work on google

[HuskyPup]

Aha...Do I now know why Google does not like my main CMS gallery as much as it used to...It can only take the "normal" image and display it, mine are set to 400 x 300, it can't grab the javascript pop-up enlargement, usually 800 x 600, sometimes larger.

[nicolass]

second solution (tnx to DP):

Step 1 add these lines in your .htaccess (replace yourdoamin )

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} .*jpg$|.*gif$|.*png$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /image.php


---------------step 2------------------
make a new file image.php and add these lines


<?php
$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$parsed = parse_url( $referrer, PHP_URL_QUERY );
parse_str( $parsed, $query );
$url = $query['imgrefurl'];
header( "Location:$url" ) ;
?>

ps. someone tell that need to be ajusted to work with wordpress sites..

[silfiriel]

I enabled hotlink protection and traffic is back to normal from a 50% drop in visitors. Which is prove that google hotlinks images wasting bandwidth that we've paid for.
However with hotlink protection now when people click "view original" it redirects them to my home page which is bad for visitors.
But its clear that google is lying in the blog post that the CTR is actually higher because as it turns out out of 5 links on the new display image page 50% click the "view original" button.

[pixar24]

I also lost 45% of my visits in the last 3 days. ( have an image gallery )
Thx for the solutions, I'll try some of them.

Long ago, there was a company that had the slogan "Don't be evil".
It's clearly long ago...

[gbk666]

Tried out some wordpress hotlinking / watermark plugins but none of them works with google.

But i guess/hope it can only be a matter of time till wordpress plugin developers come up with solutions?

[zeus]

nicolass - yep that work, also now they use the cached image, so it looks as if it is a bad quality image

[zeus]

gbk666 - it also works on wordpress

[matrix_jan]

Any idea how they detect requests from https? How is it different from direct requests? Flickr somehow prevents hotlinking too...

The most successful protest will be hotlink prevention.

Forget about unified protest through blocking googlebot, there will always be opportunists who will not block in order to get more referrals.

[edited by: goodroi at 2:12 am (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]
[edit reason] Please no specific urls [/edit]

[gbk666]

Hiya,
okay if i understood it right the code by nicolass will prevent that the full size images appear at google how how does it work?

The best would be if a small text like "image protected by example.com click for fullsize" like has it..they also made the image a bit darker or?

[edited by: goodroi at 2:12 am (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:13 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] examplified actual domain [/edit]

[zeus]

Now its google cached image that shows, so the quality is not the best be cause they expanded the image a bit.

[helleborine]

Forget about unified protest through blocking googlebot, there will always be opportunists who will not block in order to get more referrals.

For me, that's not a protest.

I've had to deal with several image hijack exploits this year. I'm blocking my site from Pinterest but now pinners are pinning from Image search directly. Also scrapers are using the Bing search API to propagate even more infringement. With more and more pinterest clones to deal with, it's getting worse every day.

Blocking the bots from my image folder solves all these problems.

I have a following, my visitors will find me, including through regular search, where I'm getting 99% of my traffic.

I had hundreds of images that ranked very highly in Image search, but for 150 visitors per month the above-mentioned headaches aren't worth it. Two years ago these same ranking images brought me 10K visitors.

It's a permanent decision for me unless Google provides a more elegant way to stop full-size image hotlink display.

Bing is blocked until they abandon their scraping-API, and that won't happen, so that's permanent for sure.

[gbk666]

The mean thing is, blocking the bot is just half the deal. In my case i have around 25k images online. Blocking the bot is good for new images..but the old ones are all still and stay available at google

@Zeus

Okay, the blurred/stretched images..those below i think 1000x1000 pixels and above are not leading to my website now but are shown in code/hash? format. At least they are not viewable easily anymore i guess, people have to go to the website to see them. The bad thing is, people won't know that probably and click away lol.

Helleborine we are going through #*$!ty times and i bet the big ones will make it harder and harder for less and less small fishes like us.

[helleborine]

The old images are NOT available to google anymore.

I moved the images from /imageS to /image folder. Therefore the search engines still have the old address for /imageS/picture.jpg but there's no one home. Everything has been moved to /image/picture.jpg

I may be a small fish, but I can still weigh the pros and cons of what's thrown at me and take the decisions I need to take.

We need to be wary of cutting off our noses to spite our faces - I know that's NOT what I'm doing.

[zeus]

gbk666 - just remove image directory on wmt, then your images are gone within 2-3 hours. with the new code, when they click on original image button, they come to a page, where I tell people about goolge.

I have seen MANY removing images now, trust me its in the millions soon.

[lucy24]

This bit really belongs in the Apache forum, but...

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} .*jpg$|.*gif$|.*png$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /image.php

#1 it's either www. or not www. --but not both. And there is no need for [NC]. Real referers will use the name of the page they are actually on, which includes your domain name in canonical form; if they get it wrong, it's forged and you don't want them. Same goes for http vs. https. If you use both, make separate rules for the separate pages or directories.

#2 .*jpg$|.*gif$|.*png$ [NC]
reduces to
\.(jpe?g|gif|png)$
and, again, only include [NC] if you have been careless with extensions and forms like jPEg might really occur. If they're asking for a mis-capitalized filename they don't belong and deserve a 404.

#3 (.*)
Parentheses aren't needed (and create a teeny bit more work for the server) since you aren't re-using anything.

#4 and most important
rule must end with [L] flag or potential chaos may potentially ensue.

[gemeweb]

So, did someone done the code properly to redirect the "view original image" to the host page of the image? + dynamic watermark?

It would be great if someone post here the full code properly (that works also for wordpress platform).

[edited by: goodroi at 2:13 am (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]
[edit reason] Please no specific urls as per forum charter [/edit]

[Andem]

So, did someone done the code properly to redirect the "view original image" to the host page of the image? + dynamic watermark?

It's not a redirect and no. But feel free to write your own: [php.net...] might be a good place to start.

[keyplyr]

Since Google & Bing certainly will not revert to the old image search schema, has anyone tried using the tools they both offer to remove your images from their index?

In GWT it's... Optimization > Remove URL
In BWT it's... Configure My Site > Block URLs

I found GWT removes the image within a couple hours, while Bing takes much longer.

Doesn't solve the traffic issue, but it does stop them caching & hotlinking your images so anybody can copy them.

[HuskyPup]

Don't ask me what happened however Thursday I had my highest image views for January on my CMS gallery at 175.7%!

[oliversk]

Hi guys,

I agree, Adsense down, visits down at least 10% for me.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 3:40 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]
[edit reason] Please follow the forum charter [/edit]

[oliversk]

Instead of blocking Google, you could redirect direct traffic. I suppose a lot of people will use the link "original image" - so if you put some ads on it

Found this, it's a little dated but a start
[webmasterworld.com...]

My idea: Simply redirect all direct accesses to a HTML file with your own ads and the image embedded into it

[jairen123]

85% traffic lost with earning. Very Thanks Google, Create hotlink Page ( Stolen My Site Photos ) and Destroy my seven years hard quality Photos works.

I request Google Please Revert back your Previous Version

[gbk666]

I have 70% traffic lost but all cursing does not help.

Google will not revert anything. Disallow google to scrape your images anymore or work on a watermark/script solution like some people try already. It will only be a matter of some days till programmers found solutions and will most likely share them online. And if that happens i will share these infos on the <snip> blog as well

[edited by: gbk666 at 3:31 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:05 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] removed specific [/edit]

[helleborine]

Google won't revert back to the previous version.

Google has to compete with unscrupulous Bing, Pinterest and its clones, who have yet to be challenged in the court system.

Why should Big G puts itself at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis the pirates, since the pirates are getting away with it?

There is no point crying and whining, our only choice is to (1) allow search engines to continue hotlinking our images and allowing them to be scraped by automated scrapers or crowdscrapers or (2) remove your images from image searches.

That's it.

Pick one or the other.

[netmeg]

(first of all, to new users - WebmasterWorld TOS says you can't drop links or specific URLs)

Google's not going to change. If your business plan depended on monetizing your images via image search, then it's probably time to start planning for alternatives, because the writing is on the wall. It's all very well to try to organize protests or make people aware of the issue, but the bottom line is - that's not going to put food on your table.

[helleborine]

netmeg has it.

I'm lucky that I have a network of related websites and to have a following going back a decade.

It's important for me to protect this "exclusivity of image display" to maintain this following.

I KNOW that I can achieve this MORE successfully by keeping bots out of my images.

Anyone that wants to see my "image/product" needs to come to my website. I have no worry about being found.

That is how I plan to keep putting food on my table.

I hold no grudge against search engines. They do their thing, I do mine.

[nicolass]

In other word..we are slaves and we will dye like slaves

ps. if you not fight