Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 5:13 PM
Webmaster Level: AllRecently at SMX West, I gave an Image Search presentation that I'd like to share with our broader webmaster community. The goal of the presentation was to provide insights into how image search is used, how it works, and how webmasters can optimize their pages for image searchers.
You'll see more information about:
- Some background on the reach of Image Search
- Interesting findings on the behavior of image searchers
- Our efforts at handling multiple image referrers
- How to best feature images (image quality and placement, relevant surrounding text, etc.)
36 comments:
Great Presentation - 2 Questions:
Is the Use of a Tag helpful? Specifically in Blog Images
What about the use of Copyright images, especially if the End User wishes to Print that Copyrighted image? How or should this type of image be "blocked" in the Image Search?
Thank you,
Actually the presentation wasn't that useful for me :(
I'm sure that Image search is great for websites where images are important for the information.
I'm missing in this presentation what information about an image is important to rank in the results.
Just an example: My wife's site is about face paintings, while she got a lot of organic traffic is the result for the same search in Image search not related. She has a gallery of a lot of examples and Image search shows a logo from some makeup firm located on that site.
Maybe you can provide some example code or links to sites which are well optimized for google image search
just saying hi martin
binxie 15@mac.com
martin emanuel
I was wondering also about the maps and if the goggle Iframe would have the same principles and again what is important for the images to rank?
Great presentation, thanks!
You mentioned exif data - does Google read and interpret all this information when reading images?
I am glad you are addressing this. If you do a search for lets say dvi. You get horrible image results or low quality products and pictures. (Not the same as waterfalls but shows work needs to be done.
Webmaster tools "top search queries" shows the position of your page on the SERP page. But it doesn't tell you if the search was image search, or what size images people were searching for.
Adding a new column, "type of search" where the entries would be "web" "image-[size]", etc would be informative.
Russ, using ALT text is a great best practice and is useful to both users and Google. Use it to briefly describe the image. This will help users with screen readers or with images turned off to read your page.
The best way to block images from image search is to use robots.txt.
Hank, thanks for the suggestion :)
Hello
This thought are interesting, but perhaps you should care more about the "core" of your engine.
So, first, you're telling about "Our efforts at handling multiple image referrers".
But do you understand at least that some people doesn't wan't their picture to be hotlinked on blogs or discussions ?
WHY ?
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For instance, imagine that i m an artist, and that i wan't to display my copyrighted picture from my portfolio, BUT that i don't wan't some stupid guys to take the link and put it somewhere else.
Second sample, you ve done a great picture, this picture attract a lot of visitors , but a man stoled it and put it on his blog ... the engine indexed it on the blog ... and the result a big lack of bandwitch for all pictures stoled.
A SOLUTION ?
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If yes, could you ask your team to at least add referers in the HTTP_HEADERS of "Google Bot Images" .
Indeed, there is "antihotlinking" script, but as they use the referer as reference and that "GoogleBot Images" doesn't add them, this scripts have to consider that all traffic crawled with a "GoogleBot" user agent is good, if they wan't to be indexed
... the result .. a picture is indexed on all website (main site, and site of the thief). BUT when the people will click on the picture of the thief website, they will only see the "antihotlinked" picture. Consequences : the end user is not satisfied.
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Secondly, there is still some problem with encoding in google images, that's not the case for english website but for some chinese, russian or even french websites ... the result are not displayed because of wrong encoding handling in the result
For instance
http://luffyserveur.free.fr/4-bug.PNG
Full explanation here
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=471e436e38fc6a48&hl=en
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So to include, it's good to improve the performance by trying to give the end user what he really wan't. But there is an other aspect from the webmaster side , this webmasters wan't to have more control about how theirs pictures will be indexed.
I hope this blog is not a marketing stuff to improve "google sense of communication" without possible interactions with the readers, and that this aspects will be taken into account.
I run two online stores http://www.internetmemorymattress.co.uk and http://www.memorymattress2go.co.uk I like the concept of image searching, but as an ageing non IT person I intend discussing this in detail with my web guy. Thank you.
Very good in depth look at image.. cheers fella, will try and implement it into my sites.
Are domains penalized if images are hosted on a seperate domain than they one they are embedded in.
For example site.com hosts mosts of their media on imagehost.com.
I have noticed that about 70% of the images in the top 100 are hosted on the same site they are embedded in. It seems to me that it puts your site at a disadvantage. I have even done a blind test to see which image shows up in search with the same keywords and html but with one hosted on a different domain and one hosted on the same and I saw similar results. Sites with embedded images are at a disadvantage. Can you confirm this?
i have a doubt and its that.. if i crawl my header image form other website and put alt tag in it so it will benefit for my site or image hosting site.
work for a medical practice and have begun to work on some emarketing initiatives - how can image search help our practice to grow - any suggestions on how it may work with pictures of our doctors and practice - any suggestions would be helpful - thanks
No offense but I found this a little long-winded. What I got from a 14 minute presentation:
To get your image ranked include content along with it.
Would love to view the presentation, but I can't view it for some reason. It's not showing. Can you give a separate link?
Thanks,
Blozard
A site stole my content. The webmaster of that spam site copied exactly all words and images from my blog. It hotlink all images from my blog. When my visitors search for every keywords relevant to my blog, Google images search shows only images and link to that spam site (on the first page) . They never can't find my blog on every images or web search results. However, all of us (my visitors and I) know many images in Google search results are mine based on the direct links of tha images and all their titles have my blog's name. When I tried to contact Google about this, they never reply me or remove those spam index. So Russ, don't worry about Copyright, you can use all copyrighted images and hotlink from other sites. You site will be indexed and rank very well. The orginal sites will never be displayed. Yes, it's true.
@Joyful Thiek:
The URL for the video is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2Zaj0CAUoU
@Hot men chart: Understanding the original content publisher is a difficult problem on the web. Feel free to add to this thread your URL, the URL of the site you believe is scraping you, and the Image Search query that returns the other site. Although I can't make promises, this issue is something we're trying to improve upon. Thanks!
Thanks for the presentation, it was very helpful My site www.interpoint.com has product images on each individual product page as well as in the product lists. There are three different sized images for each product. I would like to add alt text to each main image but some of it would be duplicated for each image. For instance, the alt text for 30 of the images would have the description "DC/DC converter" as well as their individual wattages, outputs, and number of outputs. The pages they are on have the same information in the text on the page. Since the DC/DC converter phrase will be often repeated, will I get into trouble with the page ranking?
What happened to the fun image labeler?
Great info. I agree with Hank that breaking out the search versus image search would be helpful. We have a large collection of bedding photography and have thought about using it for search purposes. As the down bedding manufacturer for many department stores what I would need is a way to exclude any of their photography as they own that i.p.
Thanks - Stef
http://www.ShopDownLite.com
Very good job :))
weldone
thankyou i'm girl from morocco my blog : http://fatima11-fatima.blogspot.com/
Nice video about blog images.
http://allspecialsummaries.blogspot.com/
Thanks for giving me the grace to post a commenthere.
My weblog is http://www.cashmintzblog.com
I am happy to be here. The Image search is very useful.I would like to know if copywright is enabled.
You guys are doing good works here. Please tresure it. Well done
Akinnuoye O Williams
I have a website http://www.pakshark.com
The google webmaster tools does not show an option for enhanced image search for me. Any help?
Peter,
You implied that you're looking for EXIF on the page. Are you doing anything to look at meta data contained within the file (i.e. IPTC or EXIF)? Many pros spend a lot of time to embed this information -- particularly because removal of the information violates the DMCA.
It would be great if IPTC Description, IPTC Keywords, and IPTC Copyright could all be parsed.
i need help to remove/ refresh my website from google my website link is www.freewebs.com/al-3doni i wantit to be www.al-3doni.webs.com
Thank you so much for the presentation. I thought you may need to mention photos as well. Google differentiate between images and photos. Photos are the ones that user upload to Picasa.
Actually in my website, I have both images and photos search boxes, www.onlyjust.net.
Thanks
Hey very good job :)
i love this stuff :)
google is the best
this is really very nice presentation
http://www.smartimeinc.com
Hello,
Sorry for the delay here, we've been busy releasing some new features on Image Search (a nifty color picker, similar images in labs and lots more to come).
@mumu as Maile mentioned, it's not always trivial to find the rightful owner of an image so, much like web search, we rely on many signals to tell us which copy it is users prefer. If you find a site using your image illegally you can follow the DMCA instructions found here: http://www.google.com/images_dmca.html. Also, thanks for reporting the issue with IDN, will look into it.
@TimGill lots of great image centric sites host their images on a different domain to their HTML, there is no penalty for doing so.
@George agreed, next video will be under 2 mins :) Any topics you'd be interested in hearing about?
@Techmom don't worry about staging different sized images with the same ALT text, we're usually pretty good at figuring out what's going on and presenting the right result to the user.
@FightBusters I'm a huge EXIF fan, it makes perfect sense for the image itself to be able to carry pertinent metadata and we're always looking at ways it could be used especially as adoption rises over the coming years.
HTH for now.
Hey guys,
I notice you have a lot of videos on Webmaster Central. I am hearing-impaired and cannot hear these videos much less lip-read them successfully.
Is there any way I can get a transcript for these videos so I follow too? Thanks in advance.
Sincerely,
Jey Pandian
I'm fed up with Google associating images with the wrong sites. If I host an image, I expect my website to be associated with the image, not the leeching site. For example, type http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Awww.space.com&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&aq=f&oq= into the search box. You will see theres a lot of page returns that don't return www.space.com pages. Space.com btw is not my website but just a good example and I have no connection with them.
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