referrals from images.google.com

[coffeebean]

Is there any relationship in terms of ranking and overall exposure between images.google.com and the standard Google serps? Referrals from www.google.com are pretty slim while those from images.google.com have taken off.

Is this a good sign, or are they unrelated?

[Stefan]

Is there any relationship in terms of ranking and overall exposure between images.google.com and the standard Google serps?

In terms of ranking, I don't know, other than our site does well in the normal serps, is popular with the Google imagebot, and brings in a lot of hits via image searches.

In terms of overall exposure, you can hope that those people who find the site via images take the time to look around... some of those who arrive that way for us do, (of course, some of them just hotlink to our pics from forums).

[karmov]

I don't think they're necessarily related in any way. We get a steady trickle from images but the bulk of our SE traffic comes in through Google. We've been working to increase traffic from Google and it's worked, with no difference in image traffic at all.

[sun818]

Hi, I think the images.google.com is often used to copy graphics for hotlinking or other purposes. I personally prefer to be excluded from Images. But because Froogle requires it for their data feed, I had to upgrade my web hosting account to accomodate the extra traffic.

[dirty_marra]

Our traffic pretty much doubled after the austin update as a result of the images search.

We had inadvertantly named one of our pictures "upskirt.jpg", which we later found out is a porn term.
(sorry, not sure if i'm allowed to give specifics in this case)

We removed the picture but had to wait quite a few weeks until the unwanted traffic stopped (we still get loads of hits from Yahoo on this term).

Given the nature of the surfer we didn't really want them using our bandwidth (plus i'm not sure they were in the mood to stop and read..haha) plus it made monitoring our stats alot harder.

In my experience the image search doesn't really help our site....but is invaluable when looking for the occational picture for the site that we don't have!

[GoogleGuy]

Things like PageRank also apply to image search to some degree (along with a lot of other factors), so you may see some rough correlation. But information seekers are often looking for different things from these different types of searches, so your mileage could vary quite a bit.