Image search - 1 more time

[coder]

Chasing down the Unicorn

I know this topic has been discussed before, and I've been through the previous threads with no help. However even after having the pages/pictures optimized for the image search I can't seem to get listed anywhere. Some of the pictures have now been up on the site for over 6 months with no SE listing. The sites are constantly crawled by google and their image bot.

Here is an example of a page that should have the photos indexed, but are not
http://www.fireworks.com/contest/view_list.asp

I've even been through competitors sites for the image search to see how they had theirs set up.

I usually like to do some trial-and-error to figure these problems out, but i'm out of ideas. Any ideas what is wrong?

[TN Todd]

I'm no expert on image indexing, but a couple of things that come to mind are

Those pages may not be able to be indexed by google properly. It hates question marks and other characters in file names. I tried this search at Google

"fireworks display contest site:www.fireworks.com"

It didn't even find the page you posted :???:

Maybe more text on the pae itself would help?

Also, your image file names themselves are a series of numbers. When I search Google images for "fireworks" it looks like a majority of the images on the first several pages include the word "fireworks" in the file name.

[Rajeev Ranjan Singh]

hi
I think your problem lies in the picture naming convention.

[flood6]

I haven't been keeping up recently, but for a long time google's image index was only being updated about every 6 months or so. So your images may be getting indexed, but may not show up until they update the image index; it seems to be handled differently than the main search index.

Again, this is information from about 6 months ago, so it is possible that this has changed since then and G images is updating more frequently.

[sfowler]

I am not sure, but I have suddenly seen a lot of activity from the image bot this week. I can't remember seeing them at all on the site before. The site was started in May.

[voasi]

Phantom

I have some good experience with Google Images. I have a few images that garner about 1,000 hits a month of traffic for Google's image search.

Google seems to give most of the weight to the actual file name of the picture. So when you're creating (editing) those pictures in Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks or whatever program you use, make sure to keep in mind a good, keyword(s) file name.

Just like with website page names, adding "-" in between each word will help seperate the word and rank better.

And of course, on page SEO for your picture keyphrases is going to help them rank better in Google's image database.

[daemon61]

Im not much in picture indexing, but I would say that part of the problem lies in the same alt tags you have for all pictures.

[coder]

Originally Posted by TN Todd

It didn't even find the page you posted :???:

Maybe more text on the pae itself would help?

Also, your image file names themselves are a series of numbers. When I search Google images for "fireworks" it looks like a majority of the images on the first several pages include the word "fireworks" in the file name.

The pages are indexed, all the pictures start with "fireworks-" then the random number to distinguish between the pictures.

[coder]

Originally Posted by daemon61

Im not much in picture indexing, but I would say that part of the problem lies in the same alt tags you have for all pictures.

Thanks for the suggestion, it can't hurt. I added the title to the alt tag.

[coder]

Originally Posted by flood6

I haven't been keeping up recently, but for a long time google's image index was only being updated about every 6 months or so. So your images may be getting indexed, but may not show up until they update the image index; it seems to be handled differently than the main search index.

Again, this is information from about 6 months ago, so it is possible that this has changed since then and G images is updating more frequently.

Flood6, I did a little searching and when I started to optimize for the image search I did a screen grab of the first pages in both yahoo and google.

Google has changed their photos back in late June, but you're right they haven't changed their order since then. So that could be a big part of the solution, I just have to wait longer.

sfowler, we've had the google image bot visit our site 127 times last week alone. So hopefully that's a good sign.

[sfowler]

That's just what I am seeing, and the beast is back today as well.