1 reply to this topic

[robk30]

Hello - new to the forum but long time reader. Thanks in advance for anyone who can help me with this!

My issue: my girlfriend has a web site that receives a steady stream of traffic from Google Image Search....until this week. All of the sudden I saw it drop dramatically for reasons unknown. It went from hundreds of visits a day to single digits. Did Google change the way they rank images? Are we being penalized for an unintentional duplicate content issue? Have any of you had this issue recently? Looking for any help or answers you guys can provide. Thanks!

Rob

[Randy]

You're talking about a symptom. You'd need to look deeper to see if you can discover a cause.

First check Google.com and run a site:yourdomain.com type of search. See if it returns pages or not. If it doesn't return anything you've got issues. If it does that's a good sign.

Then since you're talking about image searches, flip over to the Image Search side of things and try to search for the alt attribute value of a few images. Try to pick out some that are fairly unique to make it easier.

You'll probably want to review your server log files to make sure the Image Search version of Googlebot is still visiting your site. Specifically, you'll want to look for a spider that identifies itself as Googlebot-Image/1.0 since that's Google's image bot.

And it wouldn't hurt to sign up and verify the site with Google's Webmaster Tools application. Just to see if they are reporting any problems.

With image search I've seen what might appear to the surface to be strange things happen where entire sites get removed because a site gets reported for use of images to which they do not own license. This is especially true if a site happens to contain lots of images of celebrities, as the one you mentioned that I removed does. Do you have the right to use all of those images? I see the same images on dozens of sites, but I don't see anywhere on your site where you're attributing them to any photographer or other place where you may be getting them.

The folks who take those celebrity type images and the folks who pay them to take the images have entire staffs dedicated to the sole duty of protecting and enforcing their copyright. So there's a decent chance your site has been reported via a DMCA complaint if you've been using images without permission. In which case it would be 100% correct for Google to remove it from their image search database.

It's impossible to say if that's what has happened to your site. However it is a very real possibility if you've been using some else's images without permission or any type of proper attribution.