Drat you Google

[RockyB]

So, looking through my logs for Yesterday, and I see that I have twice as many visitors as before. Maybe Google has finally un-sandboxed my site!

NO

They have decided that, although my site is too yong to be shown in the SERPs they are still going to have my images. I had 180 unique visitors come from GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH! In the space of one day

This has no beneficial impact on my site beyond tearing through my bandwidth .... oh, and that's not beneficial either

Just ever so slightly peeved. Especially when one person reloads the page 35 TIMES!

[Animation]

Originally Posted by RockyB

They have decided that, although my site is too yong to be shown in the SERPs they are still going to have my images. I had 180 unique visitors come from GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH! In the space of one day

Carried out a small test recently. All my images have alt tagging and titles now.
I took an unusual title, "HMS Peanut." This photo is listed and also alt tagged with this same name by the way. Searched in MSN for a website with this title....I came second!
Then I searched again for same title but this time under images.
Only about 8 images were shown in total, but mine was not among them. So why is this image listed second in MSN websites, but nil in images, when alt tag and title is in place OK? I wrote to MSN about this.......probably loose my 2nd placing now!
Albert.

[easethan]

Originally Posted by Animation

probably loose my 2nd placing now!

Knowing the evil that is Microsoft, probably so, just out of spite lol.

[RockyB]

Seems theres one or two other people experianceing this as well:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/31448.htm

[donecweb]

I believe that when a search engine searches for images it ignores alt tags and just uses the image name. Do a search for the name of the image and you may have different results.

[RockyB]

Grr, this is getting ridiculous now. Look at my stats for the last 100 page loads:

(26)images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/reaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=425&w=297&s
(3)images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/reaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=425&w=297&sz
(3)images.google.gr/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/reaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=425&w=297&sz
(3)images.google.com/images?q=biohazard&svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=40&sa=N
(3)images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/reaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=425&w=297
(2)images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/biohazard.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=200&w=200
(2)images.google.com.mx/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/reaper.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=425&w=29
(2)www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=lemmings p900&meta=
(1)images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/explicit.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=200&w=200
(1)forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=41026
(1)forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6583
(1)search.yahoo.com/search?p=free symbianapplications&tab=Web&fr=my-vert-web-top
(1)www.esato.com/board/viewtopic.php?topic=104038
(1)images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/blog/skeleton.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.shock-therapy.org/Resources.htm&h=104&w=60&s
(1)search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=crazy frog&first=31&FORM=PERE3

Well over 1/2 of those are Google image searches. If only there was a way to block them thinks out of the logs (it is hitting a page though, so I won;t be able to *sigh* )

[robinev]

I haven't noticed a significant change in hits from images.google.*, but that's probably because I've seen a high percentage of hits from that index for well over a year.

In general, I'm happy to see the hits and I'd expect SC to show them to me.

But I also know from past experience that I have to be careful with how I add images to the site. I put images that I wouldn't want to see in an image search into a directory from which bots are forbidden by robots.txt. The image bots seem to respect that.

For images that I'd like to have indexed, I try to give a bit of extra thought to alt tags, titles, and filenames to help the SE image indexes show relevant shots.

I've also, occasionally, displayed an image as a background image in a CSS style instead of showing it directly in the page with an <img > tag.

[easethan]

You can set up hotlink protection, which will not let images be loaded from other sites, just from pages on your site. I've never used it though, so I don't know how. There is an option in cPanel if you've got it.

[robinev]

The SE image indexes that are maintained by the three big searchers don't hot-link to a site's images. For their index, they copy a site's images and serve the copy from their own servers. The kind of SE referral that Rocky is seeing happens only when someone selects an image from the SE's image thumbnail page.

This is similar to what they do for text searches, except that most of the image indexes frame the results page.

[easethan]

Ah, sorry I misunderstood the problem.