I have not tried this "trick" specifically, but I do get aa few dozen uniques from Google Images. For example, on one of my poker sites we ran an interesting article about whether you would be willing to trade sex for a big score in a major poker tournament. One of the images on the page was called "sex.jpg". For months we got a lot of hits from "sex" queries at Google Images. The visitors were most likely disapointed to find a poker article though.
I thought we had established that Google caches the images, rendering it impossible to hotlink them. That's why how this works remains a mystery. But, given that the traffic you will receive from this is untargeted, you won't recieve much of a benefit from it, unless you only care about getting lots of visitors, or you have CPM ads on your site.
Yes, you are way off First, the article in the original post does NOT mention anything about creating a link... it simply says to post an image. Second, more often than not, hitting "Back" on a browser does not register as a new hit to server logs because the browser is pulling a cached web page (UNLESS the browser is set to never cache, which is rarely the case). So not only would you NOT be getting "Back" hits from Google, but you wouldn't even be sending anyone there to begin with.
I looked this over a little better, it's not really black hat. The one thing he did that was wrong was the hotlinking to someone elses site. He did that because he was showing the image from a forum so he needed to get the image from some where. If he hotlinked to one of his ownsites that would be fine. Where the image gets pulled from is not the point. The point is that it is displayed on your page and GOogle finds it and adds it to the Google image search. The main part of this is to turn on the Google image search in your Google webmaster tools and to use alts and image titles with your keywords so Google will show your image in Googles image search when people seach for images on the topic of your keywords. When people click on it they will be directed to your site. This will only work if your site is in some way related to things people are searching for images on. Then prepare to have those images stolen from your site (that is why they searched for it!)
Alright. For all that think this is "blackhat" think about what he's doing. Just adding a <img ... link FROM GOOGLE, not from the original source (in his example a www.mixfm...) This means you're "using google's bandwidth" and you can relax. That bandwidth does NOT equal money. They will not care if you use their images. This kind of a thing is very crudely talked about in this article http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-image-search-spamming-in-action-hawaii-pictures/5252/ HOW DOES IT WORK: In my opinion what is happening is if you already have a fairly high pagerank (All you need is a 2 or more) then google hits your page (it won't work until google's come back to look at what you have) Once it does it seens your page and sees an image you have with the keywords you want and the alt= you want. then it says. "This image is with relevant keywords around it and the image is being hosted on a pagerank 10 page (google itself) so it must be important" You piggy back on the backs of google (I believe the only pagerank 10 website) and you achive your goal. This is the trick used in the article above because they're working with images from "www.people.fas.harvard.edu" which has a pagerank of 5. It's not BlackHat because you're doing nothing wrong. It's definitely temporary until google get's it's shit together. But then again since they haven't fixed the 302 redirect problem and it looks like it never will then you can't do anything about it. and all the fixes for the 302 redirect problem DON'T work on images so you can't control it. If you're worried about people stealing your images there are ways to stop it. and if you're worried that google will not be able to pay for the bandwidth your 50 unique hits a day will cause... I'll promise pay the 1.3 cents a day that'll cost them
This is called "hotlinking." This is how it works. You have a page with a picture on it. Normally, you'd have html that retrieves a picture from your own server (e.g., <img src="/images/misc/picture.gif">. But when you hotlink, the picture isn't stored on your server, it's at some other website, and actually your html simply has a link to the image. (e.g., <img src="www.example.com/image.jpg">. When someone views your site (including google), they see the picture, so "your" picture gets into google images. This is unethical because (a) you're using someone elses content without permission; and (b) the image gets sent from the other server to the user without ever passing you- thus passing on bandwidth costs to someone else. If you're already getting indexed in google, it will work. the pictures will be indexed as part of your site. I think because this is taking off, it will become a big problem over time. Don't know how it's going to play out. My server has an anti-hotlink feature called "leach protect", so I know that some sites are immune to hotlinking. For example, you can't hotlink my pics!
Wondering if this trick still works, maybe Google refine their algorithm and already found how to handle this case. its tempting me though
lol not a new trick but anyhow people were not aware about that things ! and yeah it works pretty well !
It doesn't seem to make too much sense, but I will give it a try. If it works I'll let everyone know.