Google Image Search

July 26th, 2005, 1:38 am

Does anyone know how to get into Google image search and what criteria it uses to tie the images to search keywords?

I have a site http://www.matiklarweinart.com which has been in Google for a couple of months now, and is progressing quite well up the rankings - but image search has still not picked up any of the images.

I have a fairly restrictive copyright notice on the site - could Google (or someone at Google) be reading this and not picking up the images for that reason?

Are there any articles giving indication of how to get placing in image search for relevant search terms? I mean based on fact / empirical evidence rather than supposition and theorising?

July 26th, 2005, 4:15 am

Since the googlebot cannot actually view images that we view, it uses the alt="" attribute along with the img tag to index images and the same criteria is applied when we search for images. So, please give detailed keywords in the alt attribute.

~ CC

July 26th, 2005, 5:19 am

Chrono Cr@cker wrote:

Since the googlebot cannot actually view images that we view, it uses the alt="" attribute along with the img tag to index images and the same criteria is applied when we search for images. So, please give detailed keywords in the alt attribute.

~ CC

Take a look to his website: http://www.matiklarweinart.com
He added keywords to images alt tags.

This problem is interesting, are you sure you have not a robot.txt telling google to not spider the images directory?

July 27th, 2005, 1:45 am

Thanks for the input - I thought it might be the robots.txt - but just checked it and it's not that.

I don't have good alt tags on all the images yet - working through it - but Google just doesn't seem to be picking up the images at all - so it doesn't make much difference...

Does Google use a different bot for image search? Does anyone know what it calls itself - what the entries are in the logs?

July 27th, 2005, 2:02 am

Byzantium wrote:

Thanks for the input - I thought it might be the robots.txt - but just checked it and it's not that.

I don't have good alt tags on all the images yet - working through it - but Google just doesn't seem to be picking up the images at all - so it doesn't make much difference...

Does Google use a different bot for image search? Does anyone know what it calls itself - what the entries are in the logs?

No, I don't think google has a dedicated spider for images.

Analyzing my logs these are the uniq google spiders I found:

"Googlebot/2.1 (The google bot)
"Mediapartners-Google/2.1" (The addsense google bot)

July 27th, 2005, 2:37 am

an afterthought - one of the thing I have noticed is that Google's cached pages of the site contain NO images. It used to have the images in but stopped about a month ago.

Anyone else experience this or have any suggestions as to why?

July 27th, 2005, 4:01 am

I think you cannot access directly images at your site if the referring page is not a page from your site.

This is the reason why the images are not show on google cache.
The url to the images are correct but you can access the images only if you come from your site.

Check your apache configuration or .htaccess and check if there is any limitation to referrer pages.

I'm pretty sure this is the problem.

July 27th, 2005, 4:12 am

Found some answers from my own research:

This page: http://obviousdiversion.com/?p=100 suggests that the filename of the image is of far greater importance than any alt text and that, in fact, image search (at that time of writing - Sept 2004) was not very good at using the alt text.

A simple empitical test demonstates to me that filename is still very (most) important (try searching for 'Klarwein' in image search and 3 of the first 4 results have 'Klarwein' as part of the filename) - though I suspect that Google Image Search will get increasingly better at undestanding alt text and page context.

I'm still mystified as to why images on my site are not getting picked up though. Maybe it's that old adversary - time...

July 27th, 2005, 4:21 am

BeatBlue - thanks - I'm sure you're right.

I remember now setting up something in Cpanel called 'Hotlink Protection':

Quote:

HotLink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified below) on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don't specify below (ie. html files). An example of hotlinking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from your site from somewhere else on the net. The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth. You should ensure that all sites that you wish to allow direct links from are in the list below. This system attempts add all sites it knows you own to the list, however you may need to add others.

So it looks like I need to either remove that protection or put in an entry to allow Google.

Thanks!

July 27th, 2005, 5:26 am

You are welcome.
Your problem was pretty interesting and I like your site

August 5th, 2005, 2:45 am

I think I finally have the answer!

Although removing the 'hotlink protection' got the images back into Googles cached pages, they still did not show in Google Image Search.

But this morning I noticed my log files had entries for a bot I had not seen before:
Googlebot-Image/1.0

Which I imagine must be a dedicated bot for image search - certainly it was looking exclusively at my image files - so I'm expecting to see the pics in image search real soon!