I don't suppose you found an ad campaign that might have benefited from association with your image? I ask because

the index page actually had the WP holding page however they had created at least one page including my image on it.

reminds me of something I ran across once. The domain showing your image may not even be indexed and may only be visible to "Adsbot-Google".

I'm not quite sure what you mean.

The page itself doesn't have any advertising on it and the index page is the standard WP placeholder "Hello World".

The page itself was uploaded 6th January 2020 and it's already ranked, I have subsequently found another 13 sites with my image. Four of them I know of, three of them trade directory sites, none of the others are recognised trade suppliers / names and all are Indian.

What a mess you weave Google.

This was not recent, it was at least 15 years ago I ran across my copy and image on a domain that was only found via this AdWords ad. I could not find it at the domain where it was supposed to be. The domain itself had no content but a default WP page. I checked headers for the click and it was nothing but a php redirect to an affiliate link. I cannot tell you how they set it up, but my content was being used to drive affiliate sales. I can recognize my own images and copy. It appeared as if my page had been copied in a screen grab and used as a landing page that rapidly redirected to a similar product via an affiliate link. I would never click on an ad just being nosy or curious, but this was my work shown in the ad.

Since that day I have added:

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Disallow: / 

to robots.txt to make it a little more difficult for such abuse.

In a similar situation, a customer once asked me why my product cost so much more than the same thing sold elsewhere. They directed me to an Alibaba page where someone had copied my entire product page verbatim, using my images to sell a drop-ship knockoff at a vastly different price. Alibaba was very co-operative in taking it down.

RedBar, you don't say whether you're speaking of a site on WordPress.com or not, but I'll throw this out in the event you were.

When my blog was still on WordPress.com some years ago it was routine to find WordPress.com "Hello World" scraper sites containing both my content and WordPress.com ads (because the perp was a) a site b) with content c) on WordPress.com. With eleventy billion or whatever sites under their aegis they have little clue what all the children are up to at any given time.

I assumed at the time this was known as "how the sausage gets made".

Also, maybe because WordPress.com has (or had) internal functions that routinely feature-rotate a site before large blocks of its own captive eyeballs, their sites invariably seem to rank higher in Google than independent sites using the same WordPress software, something to do with legitimacy and authority, I would presume.

eleventy billion or whatever sites

Wow ... that's HUGE :-)

It's hosted in India on an incredibly slow server.

I have all their contact details now and will actually have one of my local guys pay them a visit since they are, literally, just around the corner.

I don't think g favors WP sites ... but I do commend WP for promoting their framework as the best on the web and getting that the newbies playing in their cut and paste game!

(WP's success in marketing is g's sigh of "well, more stuff to index".)

I don't think g favors WP sites .

G seems to rank new WP scrapers much faster than regular new hand-built / CMS sites, it's very noticeable in my widgetworld and it's rarely a short-lived phenomenon.

I

RedBar, a quick search shows that WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the web, which, in itself, would account for a lot of the apparent bias you're seeing.

In my experience, WP is also the choice target of hackers and spammers, because it's easily hacked if not kept updated and patched... and this might or might not compound what you're seeing.

Also, to conjecture about these networks... a hacker targeting WP sites to build a network for funneling PageRank doesn't necessarily need to build his own sites on the same platform, as the possible variety is huge.... But familiarity with the software and its similarity to much of the web, which would help it to blend in, would provide more reason why use of WP might be growing.

Google gets targeted by hackers, scrapers, etc, much more than the other engines simply because it has a larger percentage of users, and much of this activity, which involves cloaking, is therefore Googlebot-specific.

WordPress powers 35% of all websites on the web,

I thought it was much, much higher than that, I don't know why I had 65-70% in my mind!

I agree with what you're saying however my obsevation is that WP sites seem to rank easier and faster than regular sites, obviously WP makes scrapers very easy to build, it's probably the sheer volume of them that makes them more evident.

As I noted above: WP can have a fully functional web site running in 5 minutes or less. And we already know hackers are lazy folks who deal in BULK to accomplish their goals...

That g picks these sites up merely restates they are very good a finding things to index...

The new age of web designers considers WP the only way to go, probably because no skills are needed to build a website by using it. I get the same message from Google support and that is probably because their staff are also the new age of the Internet, only born yesterday and can only see what is in from of them.

I have even had our SEO people suggest that they could rebuild our websites using WordPress. Yes, they were hinting that it would be an improvement. But from my point of view, they were simply hoping to get another job. My sites could not be improved by using WordPress. In fact it would only slow them down!

But the big problem with CMS like WordPress as I see it, is that they are constantly changing and some updates break all sorts of things. Plugins stop working and you have to update those, that is if an update is already available. But if your site is modified you can't update because doing so will overwrite your custom code. And if you don't update you will eventually be hit by the exploit that they patched in their update.

Having a WordPress site will mean that it will be targeted by bots designed to exploit it. But you get them anyways. Our logging shows the same woodpeckers pecking at Windows servers and websites running ASP.... hundreds of them every day. We blocked most of them by blocking their ISPs at the firewall. It's not that they could do any damage, just a waste of bandwidth and unwanted logging.

In fact it would only slow them down!

Why is it, generally, only the more experienced / older hands realise / notice this?

Supposedly G likes speed yet will index and rank a diabolically slow site on an incredibly slow server just like the WP site I am whinging about?

I have always built fast sites since 1993, many people have jumped through G's hoops to achieve fast sites, but then G completely takes the urine by ranking garbage!