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March 11, 2009

Optimize Web Pages for Google Image Search

Google Webmaster Central blog points to an interesting video about improving your ranking in Google Image Search.

Here are some insights:

* it's not important to get the top rankings, users often click on the next pages of results to find appropriate images. There are many "subjective" queries and users tend to explore instead of trying to find the perfect result.

* use images that are large enough.

* use high-quality images.

* include descriptive text next to the images.

* place the images so that it's not necessary to scroll too much in order to find them.

* Google Image Search clusters (almost) identical images and usually only one of them is displayed. If more than one page embeds the image, Google tries to find the most relevant page for that query.

* there are many new use cases for Image Search: inspiration, visual dictionary for foreign languages, shopping, research.

9 comments:

  1. The big question is how do you PREVENT your images from ending up in Google image search. I have

    User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
    Disallow: /

    in my robots.txt file but I keep finding my photos in Google image search anyway - images of my young children that I don't want showing up in searches. Since experience proves that Google doesn't obey the properly formatted robots tag, how else can you PREVENT the evil Google Image bot?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, Mike - you could stop linking to your photos in the first place. 3 clicks to thi:

    http://www.mikesussman.com/photos.php

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well I'm with "Anonymous"...

    To prevent google from showing your images, do NOT put them publicly visible onto your (google) picasa web-album!

    http://picasaweb.google.com/gopanthers

    I guess one should realize that images PUBLICLY visible on a GOOGLE page will be SHOWN by GOOGLE....

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have a site 'www.chinahotels.hk'. In the past months, we delievered to increase google index by optimizing seo, freshing contents inside website, adding news, etc.
    We also use google adwords to analysis keywords density

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello.
    My blog images are not indexed on google image at all
    i have a lot of them (my site is about funny pics and funny video)
    How i can do so google see them?
    Thank you!
    3arabax.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. hi
    i have a blogger blog full of images but google not indexing images even though google have indexed my website

    ReplyDelete
  7. hi
    i have a blogger blog full of images but google not indexing images even though google have indexed my website
    http://bollwoodypics.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. i have a blogger blog with one post with many images and they did not show up for many months, but suddenly they did. i would like to exclude them, but don't see a way. they are physically on an server. according to my understanding, a robots.txt would not help.

    i have learned something that may explain, why blogger/blogspot images show up in some cases and not in others: (quote of another users posting follows)


    Pages that are in the supplemental index will have their images removed from Google image search. My images pop in and out of the image search results as my pages pop in and out of the supplemental index.

    One way to ID pages in the supplemental index:

    site:example.com -site:example.com/*

    Google has lately been tossing all of my image gallery pages (interior pages with lots of photos on them and only photo caption text) into the supplemental index. Pages with fewer, larger images and much more text are doing a lot better.
    http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3522027.htm

    ReplyDelete
  9. how do i make my post image appear in google search too not only google images. i see some sites who post image and titile are in google search can you show me how please

    ReplyDelete

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