Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
<div class="blockcontent"><p><iframe height="18" frameborder="0" width="137" src="http://example.com/clock/... ..." allowtransparency="true"></iframe></p>
I added an embedded code for time and date and noticed within a month my Google Images dont show up anymore for my main keywords. They used to show up on the first page.
The only change I made was add the time and date block. Could this effect anything or is it something else?
thanks in advance,
DP
[edited by: tedster at 7:28 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]
There was a case not too long ago where a newly added iframe created problems with regular SERPs. That was mostly because Google does a visual layout simulation for the page and in this case they calculated a suspicious amount of white space.
my site is still indexed and gets decent traffic from Google, but no longer Google Image. the amount of referrals from my images have decreased significantly.
I think I will remove the iFrame (Time and date block) off my site cause although im getting more traffic from google my google image referral is pretty much gone!
it took me about a year to get decent traffic from Google Image, and within a month its almost all gone!
Of course you should check into the validation errors, but unless they really break the page validation errors do not cause SERP changes.
No matter, I can still understand backing out of this change - please let us know if anything changes for you afterwards.
I will keep you updated on this one once I see changes in results.
thanks as always Tedster,
DP
For now when I google image: site:example.com only one image shows up.
And this is the only image that shows up on Google Image for a few terms that are the keywords underneath the picture.
has anyone else experienced anything similar?
I removed the iFrame Block that I have mentioned (a month ago) and I still dont see any changes in Google Image SERPs.
Is there a possibility that my site has been hijacked and there has been some code modifications not allowing bots to crawl the images?
hosting companies, location / names of the images, context of the text surrounding the images, types of the images, size of the images via compression, robots.txt, .htaccess including: friendly URLs, other mod_rewrite, expires or caching, rewrites, etc.
I listed quite a few things above that should not matter, but basically am asking: Did anything else at all change on the site, besides the adding and subsequent removing of the iFrame?
Not sure if this should be an alert for the rest of the people, but I know im not gonna use iFrame anymore cause I lost a decent amount of traffic from Google Images. I ranked very well for a few top keywords.
Should I send an email to Google? Any recommendations?
This is getting very frustrating... Should I wait longer to see if the images come back? or do you think I have been banned or imposed a penalty?
http://www.google.com/contact/ do they respond to emails?
About ranking problems? Not very likely through the public form. There's a better chance at a response (though still not a detailed or specific one) through a reconsideration request in WMT, which automatically verifies you as the site owner or authorized agent for the owner.
[paraphrased:]Their guess is that Google sees pages that are nearly identical -- the same HTML template with very little unique text. Because of this, they think that Google is ignoring images on those pages.
Although I don't think the above really applies to my site. But I dont know.
So in short now im thinking it may have had nothing to do with iFrame it just took Google Images a year to find out that my images were maybe not good enough? I really dont know at this moment.
Anyway, I guess this post is not very active so ill stop here and only let you know in a few months/years once the images do come back or I figured out the main problem.
[edited by: tedster at 5:02 am (utc) on Dec. 5, 2009]
We clued into why, when we ran a spider over the page. The spider was unable to see any content after the Iframe. And it aslo seems the embeded object had a small error in the code and was causing the same effect. We moved both the Iframe and embeded object to the bottom of the page and the page is beginning to climb back up in the serps. My uneducated guess would be that the image spider is getting stuck at the Iframe and unable to read the images...
One is in a Matt Cutts post from this Google Webmaster Help thread [groups.google.com], about 2/3 of the way down the page....
Matt Cutts - Dec 1 2008 11:49am
...Essentially, our search algorithm saw a large area on the blog that was due to an IFRAME included from another site and that looked spammy to our automatic classifier. I believe that this bug has been fixed now. We also added additional safety checks to the relevant system that would escalate to an engineer if this site had the same issue in the future....
Whether this means that large iframes now raise a flag that will trigger a manual inspection isn't clear. In this case, the iframe was "from another site."
The other comment is a JohnMu from this Google Webmastermaster Central help post [google.com]....
JohnMu - 9/21/09
I wouldn't count on content which you are including as an iframe on being crawled and indexed within the context of your pages. That said, seeing how these are demo-sites, I imagine you are aware of that and this is part of the goal, correct? If so, I think you should be fine like that :-). If you want to make sure that they aren't indexed at all, you may want to use "noindex" robots meta tags on the demo-shops or disallow crawling with your robots.txt file.
This suggests that using iframes to keep some kinds of content from being indexed is probably OK.
I've not had adverse effects from iframes I've used, but it's an area I like to revisit from time to time, as I believe that intent enters into it, and there are ambiguities in how hiding some kinds of content might be regarded.
