Google image search - Why you may have lost traffic

[galacticX]

I have asked my developers to make a WP (I use Wordpress for most of my sites) image redirect plugin for non on site referrers. Direct hits from off site on images will redirect to show the image full size or scaled inside the blog instead, with option to popup full size. It should at least recover some of the traffic that clicks on "view original". I presume Google would still be able to spider through the site since the referrer will be from on site sources (?).

Will make available to BHW members when complete.

EDIT: May after some discussion internally have to add a list of accepted external referrers to allow Googlebot crawler to index images but still not allow images to be accessed directly from google search pages. Will release a beta so we all can test to see what works best.

It would be great if you can share it with us.
Your developers have to create a code so when the visitors click View Original Image to redirect them to your post where the image is placed. Also, when the image is loading on google it should appear darken and at the top of it: Click for full resolution.

 

[jstorm]

I was wondering why my traffic from google images just dropped. I just checked it out and to be honest, a lot of users would rather click on view original image than go to the site where the image came from. So does this mean that all our content belongs to google? Or are they saying that it's ok to scrape other people's websites and leave minimal attribution?

Heck, IMHO they've f*****d up the entire Internet. :headache:

 

[ivanpenev]

It would be great if you can share it with us.
Your developers have to create a code so when the visitors click View Original Image to redirect them to your post where the image is placed. Also, when the image is loading on google it should appear darken and at the top of it: Click for full resolution.

I am not very sure, but when I was searching for something in the images I think I saw that, the image was kind of blurred and you had to click view full image and it was redirecting to the site. That seems like a very good idea.

 

[bigbong]

I am not very sure, but when I was searching for something in the images I think I saw that, the image was kind of blurred and you had to click view full image and it was redirecting to the site. That seems like a very good idea.

Yup. Working on it. Hope to have a beta we can all test sometime in the middle of the week.

EDIT: Oh, and another little kick in the balls from Google to everyone working hard to develop good image sites. I was doing a google image search from my iphone yesterday and from a mobile platform you don't even have the option of visiting the site or opening the original image. Google just displays our images (thumbs and large) directly in their gallery and you can move back and forward through all the images, but that's it.

 

[ivanpenev]

Yup. Working on it. Hope to have a beta we can all test sometime in the middle of the week.

EDIT: Oh, and another little kick in the balls from Google to everyone working hard to develop good image sites. I was doing a google image search from my iphone yesterday and from a mobile platform you don't even have the option of visiting the site or opening the original image. Google just displays our images (thumbs and large) directly in their gallery and you can move back and forward through all the images, but that's it.

Just checked that with my iphone, there is an option view in full size on top right.

 

[bigbong]

Just checked that with my iphone, there is an option view in full size on top right.

Yes, but no option to "go to site/page" like on the web version?

 

[ivanpenev]

Yes, but no option to "go to site/page" like on the web version?

Yes, there is no such option, just go back to results and view image in full size. But the idea is the full sized image to redirect to the site, right ? So that option for the mobile searches is enough, usually I click that view in full size.

 

[bigbong]

Yes, there is no such option, just go back to results and view image in full size. But the idea is the full sized image to redirect to the site, right ? So that option for the mobile searches is enough, usually I click that view in full size.

Yes, the img redirect plugin should fix it. But Google can hardly hide behind "fair use" when they steal our photos and don't even give the option to visit our site. Can't claim just to be an indexing search engine when they don't show where they stole the f'ing picture from. They've gone one step too far this time - someone is going to put together a class action against them like with the Google Book Search a few years back.

 

[zinko]

Hi

i had the same problem on my image websites, lost about 60-70% of traffic, but with htaccess and php redirect I manage to even increase the traffic from before.

There is no general solution for this problem, it is based on your page structure. if anyone is interested I can do it for you..for a small fee

 

[sroot]

Can anyone paste a possible solution that worked for him regarding the htaccess to overcome the traffic decreasing , their last image gllaery update pretty much crashed my image traffic...

 

[bigbong]

Can anyone paste a possible solution that worked for him regarding the htaccess to overcome the traffic decreasing , their last image gllaery update pretty much crashed my image traffic...

You'll find some htaccess rewrite samples by checking google. If you are using WP just give it a couple of more days for us to complete a plugin.

 

[JWQQQ]

I have lost lots of my traffic from G images--both to my blog and my tumblogs. I will block them from indexing my photos now.

 

[Dorianvans]

You'll find some htaccess rewrite samples by checking google. If you are using WP just give it a couple of more days for us to complete a plugin.

A WP plugin would be really cool. After a few days it looks like it's kinda settled at a traffic loss of around 35% for my site. Ouch!

 

[thehighmind]

I'll wait for the wp plugin too. I hope you'll share it here. Thanks!

 

[bigbong]

Ok, first test version of the plugin is ready. This first version addresses the most basic problem with the new Google Image Search - i.e. when people click "view image" google sends the visitor directly to the image page, so they don't see your site at all, just your image.

You can test it here:

http://imaguard.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ArnoldSchwarzenegger-attrbGeorges-Biard.jpg

Hopefully it would show the image, but inside the normal site layout (even though you are accessing a jpg file directly).


You can download the plugin from here:

http://imaguard.com/download/imaguard-v03.zip

To install you must:

1. unzip and then copy the entire imaguard folder into your wp-content/plugins.

2. Make sure you have WP permalinks enabled at this stage. If not you must enable it.

3. Go to your wp-admin dashboard and select plugins. You will see Imaguard on the list. Click activate.

4. Under Settings you will now have a menu option called Imaguard. Open it and make sure you don't have any errors showing on top.

5. That is it. If you go via your site to any image through a link, your site will be the referer and the image will show normally. If you try to open an image directly, though, it will redirect and show the image inside your normal layout.

NBNBNB! This is in ultra beta test mode, so don't come screaming if it doesn't work or if it did something odd to your site (although the latter is very unlikely).

I would very much appreciate as much feedback as possible!

Next stage is (in addition to fixing some small problems here and there) to actually see if we can also make a message to visit site show in the google image search.

Let's just get this basic version working first. This alone should recover a nice percentage of lost traffic from google since most people who click opts to "view image".

EDIT: The link for the image was wrong, I have corrected it now.

 

[bigbong]

Ok, a small update to fix a cache problem:

http://imaguard.com/download/imaguard-v04.zip

 

[ivanpenev]

Just tried it. It's kind of strange.
Internet Explorer - works with all images
Google Chrome - tried 3-4 it's working, after that tried for my most important one it's not working but this does not make sense, so it must be working
Opera - the image is blurred, but it does not redirect
Firefox - same like Chrome, i really can't understand why it isn't working for just 1 image.

P.s Isn't it going to be better if it redirects to the post, or that's not possible ?

 

[bigbong]

It may be that you have some images cached in your browser(s). What you can try to do is either to open a private browser session or just add ?blah after the image (that should force your browser to get the image again and hopefully redirect) (so http://example.com/image/img1.jpg?blah ).

if it still doesn't work, you can PM the image url if it is not sensitive info and I will follow up.

We originally redirected to the image post, but decided to do as a separate page. Partly because it looked cool, with the JS popup to see large img, but mostly simply because WP allows the same image to be used in multiple posts and it got messy trying to set rules for which post to redir to if the img was opened directly.

 

[ivanpenev]

It may be that you have some images cached in your browser(s). What you can try to do is either to open a private browser session or just add ?blah after the image (that should force your browser to get the image again and hopefully redirect) (so http://example.com/image/img1.jpg?blah ).

if it still doesn't work, you can PM the image url if it is not sensitive info and I will follow up.

We originally redirected to the image post, but decided to do as a separate page. Partly because it looked cool, with the JS popup to see large img, but mostly simply because WP allows the same image to be used in multiple posts and it got messy trying to set rules for which post to redir to if the img was opened directly.

Just tried with ?blah works like a charm under all browsers Didn't notice threre is JS popup, it's cool yes. Is it possible to add something like "click to enlarge"

 

[bigbong]

Great, glad it worked now

Sure, we can add "click to enlarge". I'm making a list of things to improve / add and would appreciate feedback from others who have tried the plugin too.

Btw, you should add these bots to your whitelist to under settings to make sure Google keep indexing the images for now. We're working on the more advanced redirect for bots, but meanwhile just add:

Googlebot-Image
Googlebot
Googlebot-News
Googlebot-Video
Googlebot-Mobile
Mediapartners-Google
Mediapartners
Mediapartners-Google
AdsBot-Google