Value of image search?

[ergobob]

Hello,

I was wondering how valuable having images in the image search are to SEO/SERPs.

I have a blog with a lot of images posted on a daily basis. In the past people would hijack some images which resulted in a very expensive hosting situation. So I had someone write a server script that removes all images each month when the article goes into archives. Of course, my images no longer appear in image searches because they are not there long enough to be picked up.

I am now wondering if I am missing an element that might help in the SERPs for my main pages (not the blog where they appeared).

Do you think that images contribute very much to SERPs?

Thanks,

Bob

[john@kapoo]

Hey Bob

When you say "hijacking", I take it you are referring to "hotlinking"? May I ask why you have a server sided script to delete images for when the article goes into the archieve? Why not use a preventative hotlinking script?

Sorry, I am no help for the question you ask.

Regards

John

[incrediblehelp]

Considering the introduction of Universal Search, image optimization is more important now than ever.

[ergobob]

Hi John,

At the time, someone I know was able to remove all the images.

I was unaware of something that would prevent hot linking. Could you say more about that technique? Do you know the coding?

Thanks John,

Bob

[john@kapoo]

Bob,

I don't practice what I preach as I do not have a major leaching problem, so I'm really not up to date with the best methods, but this may be of some help to you: Stop Hotlinking with htaccess.

Hopefully someone on this forum with more knowledge than I on this subject, can advise you better on what preventative measures against hotlinking are best practice.

John

[ergobob]

Hi John,

Thanks for the link. I see how they did that and it is interesting. However, wouldn't it also prevent the search engines from picking up the images to put on the theri site?

Bob

[john@kapoo]

Originally Posted by ergobob

Hi John,

Thanks for the link. I see how they did that and it is interesting. However, wouldn't it also prevent the search engines from picking up the images to put on the theri site?

Bob

No problem. I do not believe it causes an issue for search engines, because when they crawl a site for images, they copy them to create the thumb sized image like on Google image search results, for example.

*But* if you was to click on a search result thumbnail (as on Google), you notice it opens the actual page the image is on and also a frame at the top where it houses the thumbnail again - If you was to then click on this, usually the full sized image will appear, however, if this was a site where they use such preventative measures, then it would come up with an image of the webmasters choice stating that it is a 'hotlink'. So it stops people from grabbing the image in such away, but if they let the entire page download with the image on, instead of clicking on the thumb to just get the full sized image, then it is not a problem.

...Or at least, I'm pretty sure that is what happens, unless anyone can tell you any differently.

[blogginginc]

If they are hotlinking your images then why don't you use a free hosting like shareavenue .
For seo purposes, I would say that in case you want to get traffic from images, it's much better quantity than quality,(meaning, you will get tons of traffics for only one image).

[ergobob]

I started a new post for a different question related to this.

I am now worried about introducing a lot of images all at once and its effect on Google.

Any thoughts on that? Check my new post.

Thanks,

Bob