Google image search - Why you may have lost traffic

[ivanpenev]

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

Thanks, added them. I will have to test more, but I think there is a problem with the images in new posts. I was just adding new post to my site and the images didn't appear, I disabled the plugin and tried to add them again and it worked.

 

[bigbong]

Thanks, added them. I will have to test more, but I think there is a problem with the images in new posts. I was just adding new post to my site and the images didn't appear, I disabled the plugin and tried to add them again and it worked.

Odd, we haven't seen that problem before. Keep me updated! Also let me know what version of WP you are using so that I can try to recreate the problem.

 

[ivanpenev]

Odd, we haven't seen that problem before. Keep me updated! Also let me know what version of WP you are using so that I can try to recreate the problem.

Just tried again with another, there is no problem, maybe it was 1 time thing. I am using the latest version of wordpress.

 

[bigbong]

Ok, keep me updated. Usually in IT one-time-problems tend to reoccur

 

[ivanpenev]

Is the traffic from the images going to show like referral in Google Analytics ? Btw my traffic doubled last night.

 

[bigbong]

Hi!

Glad your traffic is going up again. Hopefully a little bit of it is due to now capturing direct visitors to your images and making them see your actual site.

I haven't looked into the referrer issue, but off the top of my head, with a serverside redirect like this, you should keep the original referrer (so Google Img Search would show as a Google organic visitor but without a keyword, I think). Will check it out further, though.

 

[ivanpenev]

Hi!

Glad your traffic is going up again. Hopefully a little bit of it is due to now capturing direct visitors to your images and making them see your actual site.

I haven't looked into the referrer issue, but off the top of my head, with a serverside redirect like this, you should keep the original referrer (so Google Img Search would show as a Google organic visitor but without a keyword, I think). Will check it out further, though.

Hm, yes most probably it's like that. The "not provided" ones in google analytics are with very high bounce rate 80%+ so that must be the traffic from the images.

 

[thehighmind]

Hi,
I also have two websites with funny images and after that change to google images search I lost more than a half of my websites traffic.
Just installed your plugin, tested it and works great.
I will be back and tell you if my traffic gone up, in 24 hours.
I want to thank you for the great job you've did for us, for free.

Searching on google images to find out if my competitors found any solution to recover the lost traffic, I came upon a website with funny images. When I searched images on google from that website and I click on that image (inside google images) a script/cover poped-up over that image with the text: Click here to see the full size.

Can you add that thing on your plugin too? I think with that we will recover all our lost traffic.
If you want I can show you an example of what I'm talking about.

Sorry for my english, I'm still trying to improve my english skills.
Thanks!

 

[bigbong]

Hi,
I also have two websites with funny images and after that change to google images search I lost more than a half of my websites traffic.
Just installed your plugin, tested it and works great.
I will be back and tell you if my traffic gone up, in 24 hours.
I want to thank you for the great job you've did for us, for free.

Searching on google images to find out if my competitors found any solution to recover the lost traffic, I came upon a website with funny images. When I searched images on google from that website and I click on that image (inside google images) a script/cover poped-up over that image with the text: Click here to see the full size.

Can you add that thing on your plugin too? I think with that we will recover all our lost traffic.
If you want I can show you an example of what I'm talking about.

Sorry for my english, I'm still trying to improve my english skills.
Thanks!

Hi,

It's something we are working on. But PM me the search you did so I can check it out for myself.

 

[ivanpenev]

That what @thehighmind proposed seems like a great idea. Thanks @bigbong for improving the plugin.

 

[ivanpenev]

Can this redirect be somehow againts Adsense TOS ? I don't see a reason, but we know how strict they are..

 

[bigbong]

I am pretty sure the redirect is not a violation of the adsense TOS. You are simply redirecting to show the image inside your blog, not on its own.

 

[bigbong]

Anyway, here is a version 1.2 it will now:

-Allow whitelist based on user agent (but googlebot in there instead of the referer whitelist)
-Fixed a problem with the .htaccess generation for longer whitelists
-IT WILL NOW ALLOW IMAGE REWRITE WITH TEXT OVERLAY as requested. Just check the box, add the text and it will show a darkened image with f ex "Click to see" when the image is accessed off site from someone not on a whitelist. (currently working with jpg images - others will still be redirected).

http://imaguard.com/download/imaguard-v1.2.zip

NB! Read the upgrade section in the readme file. It contains some important information - most important is the bit about making a note of your custom settings as they need to be entered again (whitelists etc).

Hopefully this now has all the functions you have been requesting. There will still be some bugs, so please keep me updated!

PS! I will be offline for a few hours in case you try to PM me with any issues.

 

[thetraveller]

Hey bigbong good job with the redirect script. I have a simple html site holding lots of images, I've searched for a viable solution to redirect visitors on the page where the image is hosted (and not on the root domain) but didn't find one.

This script of yours can be altered in such a way to be compatible with html sites? Or I must migrate to php/wordpress?

 

[ivanpenev]

Anyway, here is a version 1.2 it will now:

-Allow whitelist based on user agent (but googlebot in there instead of the referer whitelist)
-Fixed a problem with the .htaccess generation for longer whitelists
-IT WILL NOW ALLOW IMAGE REWRITE WITH TEXT OVERLAY as requested. Just check the box, add the text and it will show a darkened image with f ex "Click to see" when the image is accessed off site from someone not on a whitelist. (currently working with jpg images - others will still be redirected).

http://imaguard.com/download/imaguard-v1.2.zip

NB! Read the upgrade section in the readme file. It contains some important information - most important is the bit about making a note of your custom settings as they need to be entered again (whitelists etc).

Hopefully this now has all the functions you have been requesting. There will still be some bugs, so please keep me updated!

PS! I will be offline for a few hours in case you try to PM me with any issues.

Just tried it, it darkens the image with the text but when I click on the image it redirect to the page with text and the image there is still darken with this "click to see" on it. Going back to the previous version for now.

 

[bigbong]

Just tried it, it darkens the image with the text but when I click on the image it redirect to the page with text and the image there is still darken with this "click to see" on it. Going back to the previous version for now.

Ok, guessing it is a browser cache problem (it doesn't reload the image because it presumes it is similar to the one already downloaded. Will just update to redirect to a random &rnd=12345. Should be simple.

 

[bigbong]

Just tried it, it darkens the image with the text but when I click on the image it redirect to the page with text and the image there is still darken with this "click to see" on it. Going back to the previous version for now.

Ok, this was a little bit more complicated than expected because some browsers ignore cache settings in image headers. We had to rewrite the whole plugin to add dynamic tags to all images now (whenever you include an image in your blog, the plugin will update it to add a timestamp (it does it on displaying the post, so will work with old posts too).

We have tested in a few different browsers and can't see any problems. Could you try to download this

http://imaguard.com/download/imaguard-v1.2.1.zip

and see if that solves the problem? Remember to refresh any cache plugins and you should also delete any browser just to make sure you aren't tricked by old cached images before testing this out.

Hope it works now.

Just to illustrate:
This http://e5u.com/test/test.html shows the image linked from a remote referrer. It will show the image darkened and with a text. It says "click here" as this will work in google image search since google is linking the image itself to the website where it found it. Here the image isn't linked and thus that text seems silly. You can set any text you want, but if you are aiming at google "abuse" then "click to see" or similar should be a good alternative.

Here is the site:
http://imaguard.com/
Hopefully all images should show up correctly here. Since you first visited the website above, your browser may have cached the image, and to avoid that problem the plugin now rewrites all jpg img tags dynamically to add a timestamp. If you go the other way around (from site to stealing site), you may actually have to refresh the page. However that shouldn't be an issue - we are not too concerned about people who have already seen the image on the site seeing it somewhere else (cache will expire after a while anyway).

If you click on an image on the site, it should show enlarged and normal since the site is the referrer. If you try to go directly to the image, though, it will again show the overlay text. (if you try this you may again want to add ?ddd=bbb after the image url to avoid cache issues).

 

[ivanpenev]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It's working perfectly now, maybe my mistake the previous time was that I forget to refresh the cache of the site with the plugin I am using.

But there is something new that I noticed now (you probably already hate me..) When I click on the image which is the incentive from the text google shows "warning for redirection" something like that, my browser is not in english so I can't tell you exactly but you will get what I mean. So the person have to click on the link. I think that google was not showing that with the previous version, or was it ? Maybe I missed that.

 

[bigbong]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It's working perfectly now, maybe my mistake the previous time was that I forget to refresh the cache of the site with the plugin I am using.

But there is something new that I noticed now (you probably already hate me..) When I click on the image which is the incentive from the text google shows "warning for redirection" something like that, my browser is not in english so I can't tell you exactly but you will get what I mean. So the person have to click on the link. I think that google was not showing that with the previous version, or was it ? Maybe I missed that.

I appreciate someone testing the plugin in detail. Only way to find any issues.

Could you PM me a google link to the example you are referring to? With the new version it shouldn't actually redirect at all - google should link to the page where it found the image so I need to investigate that.

 

[eviltaker10]

Thanks for the plugin!