Traffic From Google Image Search: Re-Claiming Your Visitors

Ok, just a tiny trick for today. This one is complicated, but I also wanted to explain why it’s important.




About Image Searches

Image searches suck. Almost all of them. But they are still constantly used. This is a rare occasion on the web.

Anyone who’s used Google image search has probably realized 2 things.



Do not include the word “fat” in any search if safesearch is off.

Google image search can be gamed quite easily, and is terribly inaccurate.

Why Can It Be Gamed So Easily? Why is it so inaccurate?

Because there’s very little data they can have for images. They have your on page textual elements/pages linking to that site(rarely indicative of the image’s content), filename, and alt text. The latter 2 being the easiest to manipulate, but at the same time pretty relied on. Don’t believe me? Take a look (example - and no, I’m not the guy in the 1st picture). Optimal? Not so much. Not their fault really, just a lack of data. So they’re forced to rely on the fact that I was even mentioned on the site.

So get stuffing dem tags! (or actually in many niches you can get traffic w/o stuffing)



But XMCP, Google Image Traffic is Worthless!

Google violated a very important unspoken agreement they had with Webmasters.

“We give you content to index Google, and we don’t sue you to frequently for caching it without our permission. In exchange, you give us traffic”

So what did we get? Our page framed, and a speedy little link to “Full Size Image” that leads to our bandwidth, and is almost always clicked. Worthless traffic.

So what do we do? Break the frame.



Breaking The Frame - Note: This may have implications for other services, so add in your own code to check referrer if you’re sensitive about such things.





EDIT: While my site still gets traffic like this, it’s been suggested that Google eventually drops the image traffic. So Put that in an external JS, restricted by Robots.txt

That’s all there is to it.

A Little Fun More Towards the Dark Side…

You knew it was coming. Try this one. Load up pictures of music artists, with proper alt tags and whanot. Instead of sending them to self.location, try a ringtone landing page for that artist. Crap, if you’re sensitive you can even include the picture on the page. I’m pretty sure this is outside of G’s “guidelines” or whatever, but I’m also pretty sure manual reports would be low.



-XMCP