I have the same problem, was getting a ton of traffic from images and it's all gone in the past week. It's really annoying and I have no idea if I should change something or just wait it out.

Welcome to the forums, abdpbt.

Have you folks seen the thread about the big Image Search changes rolling out in Asia [webmasterworld.com]? It's not clear yet how widely the new interface will spread, or how fast. But depending on your user base, it may be the cause you're trying to identify.

Thanks for the welcome, tedster. I did see that notice, and it might account for a little bit of the problem, but I don't think I had a huge amount of traffic coming from Asia. I think it was mainly US, UK, and Canada. My traffic had a huge spike in November, mainly due to images, and that continued through December. The beginning of January the traffic from images started to ease up a little bit, but was still high. Then, about January 23 or thereabouts, traffic tanked down to below the pre-November levels, including far fewer images but also far fewer organic search results across the board. I thought it might be a problem with the images in the first place, but I've lost other traffic I had in the first place.

I run a blog site with lots of useful, substantive posts. No spam, no reposting, all original, quality content with no SEO techniques. I don't even know how to do SEO. I'm worried though that Google is penalizing me for something I've done unwittingly, but I have no idea what that could be!

Can your stats separate Image Search traffic from regular organic search? If your site has a penalty, you'd see it in the regular search traffic.

Yes, I looked at it in Google Analytics, and it looks like there is a flatline for all of the google image sites (google images ca, google images uk and regular google images) on January 25. I think the organic searches went down in the past week but not as dramatically as the images, more like just a small fluctuation.

I'm assuming that a penalty would mean that they had gone down more dramatically in the regular organic search, so I guess it's something with the images. But it's not asia, it's North America plus the UK. I haven't made any changes to images at all in the past year and a half of blogging.

Hi,abdpbt

I am sorry you are having the same problem, but there's some comfort in it being the same date. Image traffic died here from 250 to under 100 overnight.

I've been digging further on this with webmaster tools account > top search queries, it looks like I have lost image traffic from Google search too. Previously a search term displayed image results at about position number 3 - this has now been replaced with a video result for quite a few search terms that i had traffic coming into images on.

Try searching site:www.example.com on /images.google to see if your still in there.

Hope this helps!

[edited by: tedster at 11:13 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2010]
[edit reason] use example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]