Has anyone noticed that image search traffic has vanished

[Archbob]

I think it happened sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday when traffic from images.google.fr, images.google.de, and other international image searches just all of a sudden disappeared. I still get the same amount of search engine traffic from regular google and from places like docs.google.com but the referrals from the non-english image search vanished. I find this weird as when I search images.google.fr and others from my images, they are still in the same position. Was there some change to the way google analytics counted these referrals as since now they are gone?

[aristotle]

I use an x-robots header stipulation in .htacces

<Files ~ "\.(gif|jp[eg]|png)$"> 
Header append x-robots-tag "noindex" 
</Files>

I think it might help a page to rank in regular google search if the page has some good images. This method allows Googlebot to see the images, but still keeps them out of the image results

[lucy24]

Interesting idea. But how can Google tell that an image is good?

[keyplyr]

@aristotle
Just a FYI... Google is the only SE that supports x-robots-tag for image indexing.

I use x-robots-tag at the directly level for several purposes, but found it useless for images if those images were being indexed by Yandex, Bing, Sogu, Baidu, etc.

I wrote to Bing and they blatantly said they did not support x-robots-tag for image indexing and had no plans to do so in the future.

[loupiote]

I have observed a huge drop in Image search traffic on my photo website, starting around Jan 28.

< snip >

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:45 am (utc) on Feb 19, 2017]
[edit reason] removed url leading to poster's site, per Forum Charter and TOS #21 [/edit]

[HowYesNo]

Yes I noticed my images traffic is now only at 50% of average traffic per day. It all happened 3 days ago, since then my image traffic is vanishing. I have many com and net domains and they are all affected.

[aristotle]

keyplyr -- Yes I knew that Bing ignores that x-robots tag.

I added it to a couple of sites two or three years ago after I saw that image traffic from google had mostly dried up. By then Pinterest already had most of the images anyway. So it was like closing the barn door after all the horses had escaped. But at least it may have prevented some subsequent hot-linking

[MrSavage]

Can't anyone advise that running an image centric website that lives off search traffic is a lost cause at this point? Isn't that the best advice, albeit difficult to hear? The fact this rolls out further in recent days, and people's traffic plummets, doesn't that sign, seal and deliver the reality of this? Giving up is never the worst advice in some situations. It's what I did. Your business needs foot traffic to survive and the city just closed the street to foot traffic and rerouted everyone elsewhere. Investing more time to circumvent this? What a waste of time.

[glakes]

Can't anyone advise that running an image centric website that lives off search traffic is a lost cause at this point?

What these people are seeing with image traffic from Google is just part of the larger problem - our text and images being harvested and displayed in such a manner that strips out the potential rewards from its creators. There are many examples of how Google monetizes our creations in such a way that we never intended (re-writing titles and descriptions, using snippets in the KG, etc.). I guess what I am saying is that if there is no push back on any of this from the webmaster community, then many content creators will eventually succumb to working for Google and getting little if any return from their efforts. If this does occur, then many will find having an independent commercial internet presence will be a lost cause and likely focus their efforts on reaching people in the larger and popular communities.

Thankfully I never had much image traffic to begin with, so when it happened in the USA I barely noticed it. But those affected now should consider this moment a shot across the bow. Google is not our friend and is only concerned about their bottom line and not ours. Plan and diversify your traffic sources so that your dependence on Google for traffic is greatly reduced. And consider blocking Google from your images, especially if you see little if any traffic benefits now.

[MrSavage]

Blocking Google from images will only mean that people who scrape your images will rank your images instead. Part of Getty's argument I believe. Bing are the greatest offenders as a side note. What's yours is ours.

[lucy24]

I knew that Bing ignores that x-robots tag.

I don't think "ignores" is completely fair. Otherwise you'd have to complain analogously that Google ignores the "Crawl-Delay" directive.

Anything beginning in X- (whether request or response) can be interpreted as "Here's some extra information if you want it."

[aristotle]

I don't think "ignores" is completely fair

I think it is completely fair.

[glakes]

Blocking Google from images will only mean that people who scrape your images will rank your images instead.

They are ranking stolen images now without blocking the search engines. And by sending less traffic from image search, those profiting from scraping images will up their game and scrape even more aggressively. But let the blocker beware, many images do appear in mobile search so use caution in how you block.

[keyplyr]

True, if you block Google from indexing your images, the image thieves will be the only one getting the traffic.

Solution: Install comprehensive methods to stop scraping. Most scrapers are identified & discussed here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[smilie]

I think the solution is not for every webmaster on its own.

Free-for-all for bots should be coming to an end.

We, webmasters, need a comprehensive legal content framework. That SEs would have to follow.

[OnlyOne]

I have observed a huge drop in Image search traffic on my photo website, starting around Jan 28.

< snip >

I initially wrote the 24th Jan, but on checking, most directories show a decline starting the 27th/28th Jan. <snip> I am almost certain the problem is related to the use of non work-safe friendly words in the tags. For some titles on my site I have two galleries. One uses old Photoshop legacy code and does not have any keywords or links to other pages. These galleries have not been effected.

I have also received warnings from Adsense about having images with gore and violence and nudity. Actually, I went for many years without having any problems until I decided to tag images and galleries.

I also suspect tag links to pages with very few images on them is causing problems.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:51 am (utc) on Feb 19, 2017]
[edit reason] removed references to edited material in earlier post [/edit]

[loupiote]

there are no (or very few) "non work safe friendly words"in my tags or on my pages, and my keywords links redirect to a search URL that google cannot crawl (blocked by robots.txt), because if google bot was crawling all my search terms, it would overwhelm my server.

so i do not think those are the issues.

what is the URL of your image website that has been most affected since Jan 28?

Mod's note: ^^^ Requests or offers for site reviews are not allowed, yours or any other. Do not suggest a search query, search words, or any search phrase. No hints. No clues. This means no links, domain names, screen shots, specific search terms.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:04 am (utc) on Feb 19, 2017]

[OnlyOne]

Can't anyone advise that running an image centric website that lives off search traffic is a lost cause at this point? Isn't that the best advice, albeit difficult to hear? The fact this rolls out further in recent days, and people's traffic plummets, doesn't that sign, seal and deliver the reality of this? Giving up is never the worst advice in some situations. It's what I did. Your business needs foot traffic to survive and the city just closed the street to foot traffic and rerouted everyone elsewhere. Investing more time to circumvent this? What a waste of time.

Mine is not a business, it is a Hobby Site that I enjoy working on. It was great back in the days when the earnings from Adsense used to pay a few bills at the end of the month.

[OnlyOne]

there are no (or very few) "non work safe friendly words" in my tags or on my pages, and my keywords links redirect to a search URL that google cannot crawl (blocked by robots.txt), because if google bot was crawling all my search terms, it would overwhelm my server.

I did a search on your site for a particular NFS word that I feel I have been penalized for. It took me through to Google. I then clicked on Google's link to your page where I found the image with the same word used in the caption and description. Below the description, the word appears in a list for "View related images". When I click this word in the list, it goes through to a page with thumbnails. Interestingly, the vast majority of the 40 or so thumbnails could be considered "family friendly". However, the NFS word appears very prominently on the page in the H1 tag.

[loupiote]

> I did a search on your site for a particular NFS word that I feel I have been penalized for.

What is this word?

[loupiote]

I really doubt the issue is related to one particular word appearing on a few pages.

I think it is most likely an algorithm change that penalizes all the pages for some other reason.

For example, to make the page load faster, we load first an image with a smaller resolution, then we lazy-load the higher resolution image, and maybe google indexed the lower resolution image, and now since google is getting better at executing javascript, it sees that the lower resolution image has been replaced by a higher resolution version (of the exact same image). maybe this causes google to think that the index image is not on the page anymore.

[loupiote]

> When I click this word in the list, it goes through to a page with thumbnails. Interestingly, the vast majority of the 40 or so thumbnails could be considered "family friendly". However, the NFS word appears very prominently on the page in the H1 tag.

this site-search result page is not visible by google-bot, and of course, the term being searched is in its title. I believe this is completely irrelevant to the current issue.

[OnlyOne]

I really doubt the issue is related to one particular word appearing on a few pages.

Is it possible that there are many other words that you think are safe but Google regards as not being family safe? I tested a handful more words that I could think of and they all showed up on your site. Maybe we both reached a limit on the number of unsafe words that are allowed in anchor text on a website or in any particular directory. In addition, I found a couple of pages on your site that had only 2 thumbnails. My site has a lot of pages like this. Perhaps, some kind of thin content penalty is at play also?

I also try and make the images load faster on a page by preloading them on the previous page. I set the height and width to zero and the css to not display them. I do this across most of the site. That doesn't explain why some galleries have been affected and others are not.

[loupiote]

i doubt that a couple of pages with "thin" content would affect significantly a well established site with 15k photos.

I am pretty sure it is an optimisation that google mistakes for a malevolous / spammy / stealthy thing.

Not the first time we see this sort of thing happening.

If the words you have in mind are "girl" or "boy", as long as they correctly describe safe images and are not used in a spammy manner, i really doubt they could be the issue.

[lucy24]

what is the URL
What is this word?

loupiote, are you just returning after a long absence? You're asking questions that currently people aren't allowed to answer (site TOS having to do with naming your own site).

[loupiote]

Sorry, i did not know.

Is it also against the TOS to name the keywords that you thing google is penalizing?

[not2easy]

The specific terms of this forum are listed in its Charter: [webmasterworld.com...] and the overall Webmaster World Forums terms of service are linked in the footers: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

Is it possible that there are many other words that you think are safe but Google regards as not being family safe?

I'd think that it's not necessarily just the offensiveness of the word itself that might cause Google to block it as being unsafe for families, but also the nature of the pictures they might return. Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable quoted Gary Illyes from Google on this several years ago. In his post, Barry also discussed ways of identifying the word or words...

Naked In The File Name Of Your Image? Google Images May Block It
Jun 22, 2012 - by Barry Schwartz
[seroundtable.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

PS: OnlyOne... I note that you've mentioned tags a bunch of times, and IMO tags on image search can in themselves be problematic. I've seen many image sites that have lots of empty or sparsely populated tags, and that's simply a bad user experience.

[wltony]

I was going to do this, first preload the low-resolution image, then use javascript to load a higher version, presented to the user, and then use the ROBOTS mask the javascript file

[RedBar]

Wow, looked at my Statcounter this morning and couldn't believe the PV numbers, Googlebot-Image from Colwell, Iowa, has hit every single page of my trade directory site, thousands of pages, and all as unique visits a few seconds apart ... in fact I just looked and it's still doing it now, that's at least 3 hoursworth.

We'll see what this brings.