Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This week I was musing about all the traffic I get from Google image search. I consider this "lost" traffic, as people are coming to see (and or snarf) the image and are not necessarily interested in the content of the page.
The pages for my sites that come up in the image search have always had an affiliate 468x60 ad right at the top of the page. My new idea this week was, programmatically, whenever the page referrer is Google images, replace that affiliate 468x60 with a 468x60 banner for Google Picasa. This puts it right underneath Google's top frame with info on the image. I reckoned that an image organizer program would be of interest for people coming to the page looking for an image.
But, I was wrong. I've been doing this for going on four days now, with around 2000 Picasa impressions per day, and there has been NOT ONE SINGLE CLICK, let alone conversion.
I guess the Google image search traffic is lost traffic, after all.
What's everyone else's experience with the Google product referrals?
Frankly, I get pissed off when people say "I found this picture in Google". No, gaddamit, you found it on SOMEBODY'S SITE, not in Google! Somebody actually TOOK that photo and put it ON THEIR SITE and you USED Google to find the site.
Sorry to vent.
What do you think about writing a little JavaScript to get out of the Google frame and reload on top?
Can you point me to some coding that will do that? I get a MASSIVE amount of traffic via Google's image search, but those people are generally looking at the image and leaving or taking the URL so they can hotlink it elsewhere.
Will the javascript affect how Google lists my images, though?
<script language="JavaScript1.1"
type="text/javascript"><!-- // hide from old browsers
if (parent.frames.length > 0) top.location.replace(document.location); // Escape from any referring site's frame, but preserve one-click "Back". -->
</script>
I'm fairly certain for that entire period Google stopped indexing any new images! Yahoo has none of this sites images in it's image index, and again I believe it may be because of the frame buster code. The code posted will not break Yahoo's frame, Yahoo seems to hate frame buster code to no end.
As a result I removed the frame-buster code about two months ago, and very recently Google began to index new images I had added to the site. Google does not have to execute this code to determine that the code is present.
I get more page hits from Google images than from MSN or Yahoo's index. Google does show your page just below the frame so they aren't really so bad as sites out there that pretty much hijack your content.
I understand if your content is pretty much only images why you would like to "bust the frame". But please keep in mind there is a chance Google will stop indexing new images altogethor. I'm not absolutely sure about this statement, but circumstantially it seems correct.
No indexing problems, etc. I still see hits from Google images to my websites soooo.
Ann
BUT, I was trying to have Google index some new images with the hope that I could have similar traffic advantages.
Then, and only then, did I discover that not only was Google not adding my new images, it seemed that some of my older images had disappeared as well. Only now are my new images, finally being indexed.
I had thought everything was great, even the traffic, until I really looked into it. I believe one at a time, as viewers of this site's images hit my frame buster code, Google detected this and began flagging the images. As to how, I've mentioned some detection methods below.
I do agree hiding the frame buster code may help, but remember the Google Toolbar, and Adsense ads, are little spys, who knows how they are being used within Google as long as the data is secret!
Also Google may detect frame busting just by looking at the referrer string, to detect frame breaking, when the user ultimately hits the back button to get back to the search results.
I still have no images indexed by Yahoo and I swear I did in the past for this site. Yahoo, hates, frame buster code and defeats it.
HERE's a free TIP. (again circumstantial conclusions)
In researching Google image results I happened upon the fact that with Strict Filtering on, none of the images for this site would show in the results. This is a clean family oriented do it yourself site.
This result of course made me wonder -- This is a significant site quality measure, how might it be affecting the conventional SERPs!
I began investigating this filtering quality issue, looking at many other sites and found that in many cases fewer images showed in the results of these other sites with "Strict Filtering" on, even "Moderate filtering" was impacting result count.
I began looking into web pages my site linked to, again all perceived as clean sites initially. Then I did image searches for these sites images with strict and even moderate filters. One perfectly clean medical site, I linked to, only showed image results with no filters! With strict or moderate filters there were no images from this medical site in the search results! Another technical site I had linked my site to did not show image results with strict filtering, etc.
SO the TIP
I removed links to sites that did not pass a test of returning image results with strict filtering on (quite a bit of work). I'm far from certain I got all of them, but I definitely found some. Now, three months later, my site returns image results with strict filtering on! It also returns the same number of results regardless of the "Strict" filter setting.
Guilt by association with the innocent?
Perhaps the medical photo's on the one site trigger a filter. Other sites might have had unusual names or coincidentally used the word sex, like in electronics the "sex" of a connector is "male" or "female". Perhaps a "Moderate filter" trigger for images?
Hope this helps!
