Google Image Search - Can I Control My Images G displays?

[darren13]

Hello All,

To get straight to the point:-
We have 200 or so images which Google shows on it's Image Search results page when I search for New Forest Holiday Cottage (New Forest Holiday Cottages).

What I would like to do is tell Google which images (maybe 5 or 10) I would prefer it to show first. Now I know there isn't a hotline for this sort of thing at Google! So was wondering if there was a tag of some kind which would allow me to identify to Google images which I deemed to be of more importance?

Any help as ever is greatly appreciated guys.

All the best,
Darren.

[stymiee]

Unfortunately there isn't. Their image search results are algorithmic just like their content search. You can influence their Image SERPs just like you can influence their content search (i.e. SEO for images) but that won;t allow you any real control over what order they show images.

[spenland]

I wonder what would happen if you placed images you didn't want indexed into the robots.txt file? Never tried it, but just curious.

[briguy]

how about the "no follow tag" in your img src ? or changing your "alt tag" to some other keywords maybe your domain name?

[kgun]

Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image

[Peter (IMC)]

SEO is SEO, also for images. Just try to imagine what factors are important to a search engine when determining ranking of the images.

Likely factors:

* Image size
* Alt text
* File name
* Surrounding text

Notice how the first image in the results is shown on your website as a small image, while in fact the real image is big, but scaled down by the HTML code. Google however shows the real size of the image in the result. I wouldn't be surprised that if you resize that image to the size you want it to be shown in the site, it drops in rankings a bit. That also would considerably reduce your traffic costs and download time of the page. So in any way a good idea to do.

Play with the above factors and see what happens. My best bet right now is that if you change the file names of those images you want higher up into the search phrase, you'll some nice results.

[Webnauts]

Darren create a second folder with the images you want to have displayed in Google, and disallow the indexing of your existing images folder in your robots.txt

[magic_majax]

According to this page the img tag can take a nofollow attribute.

Just build and test using the w3 valiadator if you don't want to break links in the existing google index (I don't think google is overly keen on this)

[Webnauts]

According to this page the img tag can take a nofollow attribute.

Just build and test using the w3 valiadator if you don't want to break links in the existing google index (I don't think google is overly keen on this)

Does that mean that using the nofollow attribute, the images will not be indexed? I never heard that before. Very strange. It is though to avoid passing values, and not to hinder indexing.

[amar]

We don't have option to display images in priority. However we can restrict the unwanted images by placing them in a separate folder and restricting them using a robots.txt file.

Thanks,
Amar


SEO India