12 replies to this topic

[JeremyH]

Google displays three images above search engine results for the keyword I’m targeting.

These three thumbnails are from Google’s image results.

I know I can’t do anything about this, so I’m trying to use this to my advantage, and get an image file (maybe three image files?) to the top spots on Google images. That way, if somebody clicks on the image, they will be taken to a special page I created that has the image on it, and a link to my homepage for more.

Any ideas how to pursue a number 1 spot for Google Images?

Do you think Google Images also uses an aging filter?

[qwerty]

I can tell you what I do. I haven't experimented with any of this, so I don't know which of these factors work and which do nothing. I generally do them all.

The image should be on a page that's optimized for the keywords: title, on-page content, inbound links, etc.

The image's alt attribute (if possible, considering usability) should contain the keywords. That's not likely to help on images that aren't anchoring links, but it couldn't hurt.

The image's file name should contain the keywords, hyphen-delimited.

One thing I can tell you is that the title tag of the page seems to be very important. Some of my pictures were republished on another site, and the title tag on that other site's pages used the name of the subject of my pictures. That other site then added a bunch of pictures of other people and made the mistake of not changing the title tags on those new pages, so now pictures of these other people come up on image searches for the name of the person in my pictures.

Not only that, but I recently noticed that a series of pictures that I had linked to from a page on my site are coming up on searches for the same name. The only thing those images have to do with that name is that the links pointing to them are on a page that happens to contain the name in the title tag.

[JeremyH]

Sorry for the late thank you qwerty, but I appreciate your help very much.

Now once I get my finals out of the way, I can pursue this further!

[JeremyH]

Right now I'm still being seriously affected from Google's aging filter.

Out of curisoity, does anybody know if Google's image search also uses an aging filter?

[Haystack]

I'm not sure this will help, but it's fun:
http://grant.robinso...ess-the-google/

The game displays 20 images pulled from Google, and you have to guess what search phrase generated that result. If you can set a new high score, you'll proabably have find the answer to your question along the way.

[qwerty]

Fun I got 250-something. Way off the top 10.

[JeremyH]

OK, I took the given advice and came up with this page. http://www.printfree...raph-paper.html

Again, my goal is to get my images top spots for a given keyword in Google images.

Anybody have any comments?

Besides getting links to that page using the keywords as anchor text, is there anything else one would recommend?

Thanks so much.

[Michael Martinez]

OK, I took the given advice and came up with this page.  http://www.printfree...raph-paper.html

Again, my goal is to get my images top spots for a given keyword in Google images.

Anybody have any comments?

Google image doesn't work exactly the same way as the regular index for documents. That is because images cannot contain embedded links (much less embedded links to multiple other things). Documents contained embedded links, images are sometimes embedded in links.

The two most-asked questions I have seen about Google Images are:

1) How do you get an image indexed in Google images?

2) How do you get your image to the top of the search results?

I have never seen an answer for either question which satisfies me.


For example, search for mary ann in Google images.

Why did they pick those images as the top results?

The first one I am seeing just mentions "mary ann" in the title tag, in text right under a link, and in the name of the HTML page.

The equivalent search in the document index, mary ann, doesn't even come close to matching the images search results. Quite possibly, none of those pages have an image associated with the name "mary ann". I ain't bothering to check.

Google reports precisely one reference to the page with the top image:

http://www.google.co.....ann.jpg.html"

Yahoo! checkers will be happy to know that Yahoo! finds the same result:

http://search.yahoo....ggle=1&ei=UTF-8

The number two listing is an image with the name "mary ann" in the actual image file name:

http://www.arrakeen..../philmar02.html

You'll also find more occurences of the name "mary ann" in the page's contents.

There is also only one link reference to that site:

http://www.google.co...G=Google Search

http://search.yahoo....-245&fl=0&x=wrt


So, you tell me.

Why is the picture from Dawn Wells.com (the actress who played "Mary Ann" on the original Gilligan's Island) only listed fourth?

[qwerty]

The number 1 result has:

1. The keyword in the file name (mary_ann.jpg)

2. The keyword in the file name of the page on which it appears (mary_ann.jpg.html)

3. The keyword in the page's title tag (Kitaj, R.B.: Mary Ann:)

4. The keyword is on the page (and the page does not have a lot of text)

5. The keyword in the file to which it's linking (ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kitaj/kitaj.mary-ann.jpg)

What it does not have is the keyword in its alt attribute.

Regarding the #4 result (the picture of Dawn Wells), these are just guesses, but here's what I notice when I compare it to the top result:

1. It has the keyword phrase in the on-page content, but it appears three times on a page containing (by my count) 477 words

2. The keyword phrase is in the page's file name, but not the image's (I bet that makes a big difference)

3. The image has no alt attribute

4. The image does not link to anything (probably irrelevant, but you never know)

[JeremyH]

So, I realized that I’m making a highly optimized page for these graphics that targets the same keywords as my content pages.

That means these image pages might rank well for the same keywords, and the listings might be next to each other. I would love to have it where these image pages wouldn’t show up in the “web” search, only in the “image” search of Google.

I’m thinking I’ll need to ban googlebot on the certain file using the robots.txt file but still allow the imagebot.

Is the possible? It would seem that would screw all my search engine optimization work for that one page that was created to boost the images.

So then I thought about having a noindex,follow attribute in my html, but I can’t specify the bot in that.

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks

[qwerty]

I'm not really clear about why you want to keep googlebot away from these pages, but there is a googlebot meta tag. The syntax is the same as the robots meta:

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google's robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag. See the Robots Exclusion page for more information.

(from http://www.google.co...sters/3.html#B2)

[Nathan Malone]

I am currently getting 700-800 referrals/month from Google Images simply from no more then 40 or so pictures that users have posted on one of the forums I have over the past year. I have done no SEO work on them, they have no alt or title tags or anything like that, but they still get top rankings.

Note: The site that they were on is www.poultryyouth.com, which I have heavily optimized for poultry-related keywords so they were on a very targetted site.

[Michael Martinez]

Regarding the #4 result (the picture of Dawn Wells), these are just guesses, but here's what I notice when I compare it to the top result:

2. The keyword phrase is in the page's file name, but not the image's (I bet that makes a big difference)

The phrase is in the URL of the image file, though. Big difference? Well, we're talking about two of the top five results.

It would be interesting to see what other criteria Google might take into consideration. Do off-page factors help as much with images as with documents?