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?

[keyplyr]

Googlebot-Image from Colwell, Iowa

:)

[ichthyous]

You can easily confirm exactly what is going on by setting Google search console Search Analytics to images and then to France or Germany. In my case my image traffic fell off a cliff for both countries. There's also an update demarcation line with a note from Google. If you click the note it states that Google changed image search layouts for France and Germany to match USA. Back in 2013 I lost 80% of my image traffic in one day. Now that process is complete.

Keep in mind things have changed. Many photography and artist organizations such as ASMP and PACA are also joining suit against Google over the image theft. I am a member of the largest one and was asked to provide comment on how it adversely affected my business.

These days i use two copyright infringement services to pursue image infringements around the world. At this point people stealing and using my work has become a very nice income stream for me as it's very easy to catch them and sue them now. These services provide legal services for free in exchange for a percentage of the return. The largest is ImageRights, but another is Pixsy. So my focus is 100% on collections from infringement these days and not Google.

[aristotle]

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

Googlebot-Image normally downloads images, not pages. You need to block this fake.

[RedBar]

It went on for another couple of hours and is now about once every half hour, every visit has been from a different IP address, some repeated.

Checking the IP addresses they are all from Google, Mountain View.

[aristotle]

RedBar I thought you said they're coming from Iowa. Also, Statcounter doesn't normally show visits from the real googlebot-image

[sangi]

Just went and checked the visits form Google Images for the last 356 days (PIWIK) - up to 20 visits per day, even though I'm hosting thousands of images and Google's image bot is on the site almost all the time. Here comes the robots.txt block.

[RedBar]

I thought you said they're coming from Iowa.

Yep and I've found several other people with supposed visits from Googlebot in Iowa, I haven't a clue what's happening therefore I'm going to have to check my server logs.

[RedBar]

Oh, nothing's showing in my logs, wtf?

[Duke_of_Url]

Redbar,

Funny you should mention this, I don't much follow my logs any more since the search terms were blocked from view, but yesterday evening my main site (lots of content,hobby subject,images,articles,adsense,UK,online 16 yrs) was also carpet-bombed in the same way. Very odd, it must have hit c19k html pages according to statcounter. Things have calmed back down now, although traffic appears to be up a little since then (perhaps a coincidence).

DoU

[Duke_of_Url]

And again today, lots of page visits from Googlebot-Image - legit?

RJ

[keyplyr]

Googlebot & Googlebot-image are two of the most faked user agents on the internet.

If you don't watch your daily server logs (not a stats report) you will not know if these hits are legit or faked.

Legit hits from Google will come from Google's crawl IP range. They never come from any other range. Requests using either the Googlebot or Googlebot-image user agent but coming from a range not designated as a Google crawl range are fake.

Fake Googlebot & Googlebot-image user agents can easily be blocked. Unless you are diligently managing access to your server, you will never be sure of who is scraping your image files.

The more nonauthorized copies of your images are spread around the internet, the more these images fill up Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu's Image Search.

The domino effect continues with less image generated traffic to your web site.

[RedBar]

And again today, lots of page visits from Googlebot-Image

I'm getting a few and it seems to be less and less each hour however I've also noticed it is visiting evergreen widget facts pages that only have text on them.

The IP ranges shown is supposedly Google's however these "visits" are not being shown in my server logs.

Plus the site is generating a lot of 404s for pages that were removed 3 years ago when Google did its massive image theft ... the mystery deepens.

[RedBar]

the mystery deepens.

Mystery 404s solved, links found on some old pages, removed.

[lucy24]

these "visits" are not being shown in my server logs

Then they're not visiting you, they're visiting your analytics.

[RedBar]

I'm not sure what you mean lucy, how can they visit valid urls but not be seen by server logs?

[sangi]

@RedBar

Easy. You need to "GET" links like this https :// www.google-analytics .com/r/ collect?v=1&_v=j47&a=524571436&t=pageview&_s=1&dl=YOUR_DOMAIN%2F&ul=en-us&de=UTF-8&dt=YOUR_TITLE&sd=24-bit&sr=2560x1440&vp=2485x1343&je=0&fl=24.0%20r0&_u=AACAAEABI~&jid=1910061821&cid=68794511789.1476441457&tid=UA-87654125-7&_r=1&z=310838500

[RedBar]

Ah, I don't use GA!

[keyplyr]

If you're only getting your information from a stats report, don't... these are more entertainment than fact based :)

Stats reports (all types) are software that gives you a report depending on how that software was written. If it sees a request from Googlebot-image, it reports a request from Googlebot-image. It pulls the most recognizable attribute from the user-agent string. It does not validate whether that request came from a authorized Googlebot crawl IP range or not.

Again, the only way to see who is hitting your server is by reading your raw server access logs and doing IP address look-ups and other related research.

[lucy24]

how can they visit valid urls but not be seen by server logs?

If they are not recorded in server logs, they are not visiting. Simple as that.

Edit: If they're not in logs, what makes you think they are visiting?

[RedBar]

If they're not in logs, what makes you think they are visiting?

Simply because Statcounter is recording them as an unknown crawler yet the supposed IP addresses are all valid Googlebot-Image from Mountain View on an unknown device with 1024 x 1024 resolution however emanating from Colwell, Iowa.

Interestingly my Awstats are also showing an increase in visitor numbers and PVs however not to the extent that Statcounter is, basically Awstats is showing double the amount whereas Statcounter is showing sixfold for Tuesday.

So, what do I do? I can't block Googlebot-Image IPs since I need those images in their search and I have no other means of identifying what it is.

Do I have to assume it'll simply go away by itself?

[RedBar]

Do I have to assume it'll simply go away by itself?

Fingers crossed on this, I've not been able to do anything however the visits reduced to hourly, every couple of hours and it's more than 6 hours since its last one.

[rovi1]

I have been seeing a lot of 'page loads' as well on my site coming from (Looking through Statcounter):
Googlebot-Image Unknown 1024x1024 from Colwell, Iowa, United StatesGooglebot (66.249.65.52).
This started yesterday, and has been continuing.
Curious why now, and how is this different than other usual robot indexing. Should I be concerned about anything?
Granted more indexing is better to get my images in the index, but would it mean fewer website visitors gradually?
Thanks!

[keyplyr]

Googlebot or Googlebot-image will not come from a Colwell, Iowa IP range. This is a *fake* agent scraping your files.

So, what do I do? I can't block Googlebot-Image IPs since I need those images in their search and I have no other means of identifying what it is.

You can block all the *fake* Googlebot & Googlebot-image UAs from accessing any files on your server.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^66\.249\.[6-9][0-9]\.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^74\.125\.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^173\.194\.
RewriteRule - [F]

This allows the Googlebot & Googlebot-image UAs only from valid Google crawl ranges and blocks the *fake* scrapers.

[lucy24]

66.249.65.52

Well, that's a real Googlebot IP. (You have to pay close attention. 66.249.64-79 is Search; 66.249.80-95 is assorted googloid functions--Preview, Translate, Snippet, the current favicon--which you may or may not choose to block.)

I think the "Colwell IA" business is a red herring. Depending on your lookup, you may find all kinds of locations attached to the various specific IPs; it just depends on which data center is involved.

I don't think the Googlebot as such crawls from 74.125. Again, it's an array of googloid functions. My notes say Preview; Wireless Transcoder; urlresolver; faviconbot (the old one with no UA); Rich Snippets. But that's subject to change from year to year. I wouldn't hesitate to block AppEngine, for example.

:: detour to raw logs ::

Oh, how interesting. I haven't been visited by 74.125 at all since May 2013 (Translate). And I never noticed. Where does translate live these days?

:: more business with logs ::

Some 66.249.90-95; also 66.102.0-63 and 64.233

[keyplyr]

Well, that's a real Googlebot IP

Yes, I didn't see that rovi1 posted the IP. I only kept reading about Googlebot supposedly coming from Colwell, Iowa.

This is yet another example of misinformation from stats programs.

All the Google IP ranges I listed use UA variations that include "Googlebot"

[RedBar]

Mine have steadied to about once an hour which is next to nothing in the overall scheme of things and I'm certainly not prepared to experiment with blocking valid Googlebot IPs.

[RedBar]

Mine's moved, it's supposedly coming from Mountain View however still nothing in my logs!

Plus it's very irregular now, maybe three times in 10 minutes and then nothing for 5-6 hours with a single visit.

What on earth is the purpose of this, any ideas?