I recently tried to get back some traffic from Google Image Search by adding the following code to a htaccess file in a number of different directories on my image site. The redirection is a 302 which has users transferred to the gallery page the image sits on when they click on the "view original image" link in the search panel. The image is displayed at full resolution on this page but is resized according to a visitors browser dimensions. There is no other unrelated content on this page.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://example.com.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^images/(.*)\.(jpe?g|bmp)$ http://example.com/Directory1/pages/$1.htm [L]
I am now concerned that Google may have deindexed some images because of this 302 - but I am not sure this is the cause on its own.
All of the images (approx 20) that were performing very well in one particular directory have all now been deindexed. Interestingly, there is one scraper site that has hotlinked to one of these images. This site has replaced mine on the second row of images. The "view image" link redirects to me but this image does not show up when I narrow the search to my own domain. Some images still remain when "site:example.com" is used in the search query but these have always performed poorly and do not show up for their relevant keywords. I have also recently discovered that this directory has numerous backlinks from Russian spam sites but these links are to the main gallery thumbnails page, not to any of the images.
Also, one particular image in another directory has been deindexed after being in the index for many years. A person shown in the image has a Russian name that is only conveyed in the alt text.
All other directories (about 10) that this code was applied to are either holding steady on the number of impressions or are seeing a slight gradual increase.
Is there anything that can be done about the links from Russian spam sites? Anyone think this could be the cause?
