My site's images all look blurry/low-res in Google Image results, why?

[ichthyous]

Hi I was wondering if anyone else has seen this problem popping up. I noticed recently that all the images indexed from my website are showing up blurry (low-res) now in Google image search results. That was never the case previously. I haven't monitored image search closely but I started to notice this about 6 months ago now.

I thought it was perhaps the anti-hotlinking code on my site, so I tried changing it but nothing changed. When I browse other images the full resolution image loads. If I click on see full resolution image and it loads just the image, when I return to the grey 'lightbox' window with the image preview it then loads the image from the browser cache and looks sharp. Is google just caching some sort of low-res preview these days and not the full-res image? My images are usually quite large...around 65-175K in size.

Has anyone else seen this lately? It could be killing my image traffic...or what is left of it. Thanks!

[aakk9999]

I am wondering whether you have seen any sighificant traffic loss from blury images?

I am asking this because I know that some webmasters blur their image that they show to Google on purpose, in a hope that a searcher would click through to the site in order to see non-blured image.

[lucy24]

I did some close testing shortly after the new-format image search was introduced. The image shown in the image-search lightbox is not your actual image as crawled by the googlebot. Instead, it's a cached png copy. Your "real" image isn't shown unless the user clicks on the lightbox to view either your image or its page.

The trick is that when a user clicks on the thumbnail in image search, your image is immediately requested. However, it isn't shown unless the user goes on to the next step.

If you like, you can take advantage of this phenomenon by serving up a one-pixel gif with immediate expiration. This forces the human user-- that is, their browser-- to make a fresh request if and only if they're going to your site. The first request has a distinctive referer (not user-agent) such as "blank.html", which allows you to handle it differently. The user won't notice anything. But if you have large images, your server will thank you.