I noticed a decent increase in visits on the 2nd/3rd of October, after digging a little deeper they were from Google images. I've never paid much attention to this, infact I considered stopping stopping G images and hotlinking previously but I am now glad I didn't. I am ranking highly for a 2 keyword phrase, not competitive money wise but still good for traffic nonetheless, so I had some thoughts and questions: -I've implemented a frame breakout so any users who click the initial thumbnail will redirect to my site. My thoughts were some of the people were simply looking for the image, they would click 'see full size image' , take the image and then leave - hopefully this will help prevent this. -Currently using awstats the traffic referrals are being logged under '- Google (Images)' - So I'm assuming this figure is people who have actually clicked the image rather than just the effective impressions on the search results page (for example here) -A similar effect could be achieved rather than breaking frames using a mod_rewrite rule - which would be best for trying to keep the position long term? Would redirecting breaking frames or mod_rewrite likely make any difference to the ranking in Google images? -Does anyone have an idea how Google images are actually ranked? Take this search for Google on google images - the first result currently is a file called FutureGoogle_423x385.jpg on battellemedia.com/images/ . My image is in the format keyword1-keyword2.jpg which seems to be doing well, yet the results for the above aren't as 'optimised' in my opinion. Since images only have a filename what else could be used to rank except alt text, backlinks and potentially anchor text? My site is a content site with the image used a few (less than ten) times alongside content, so whilst the traffic might not be my ideal target audience it seems worth putting some effort in to keeping some of the few hundred searches per day: arguably if they are looking for an image they are interested in the subject anyway.