About a month or so ago I had all my site images hosted on Photobucket, and was getting a healthy percentage of site traffic through Google Image Search. I moved all my images from Photobucket to my own site a few weeks ago (so I could manage the images with Coppermine). Within a week, traffic from Google Image search started dropping off and rapidly dropped to zero where it has been for the last 3 weeks. All my image text, alt tags, title tags remain unchanged. Can I expect image search traffic to return to previous levels within a few weeks, or have I done something that will have long lasting impact on my traffic? I'm wondering if I should reinstate the images on Photobucket.
it will take some time... any major change like this will require at least couple weeks to reach the same traffic levels.
Thanks folks. Does it make any difference to how well the image ranks if it is hosted on Photobucket compared to hosting on your own site (all other things being equal)?
well for sure its much diffrent Photobucket is pr7 and powerd by google so i think u need to work good on ur pics name make them uniqe as possible and dont forget the alt for sure and dont change places alot google hate that
Six and a half weeks later and my image search traffic is still zero. Site traffic overall has dropped 30%. Looks like moving my images was a mistake. Not sure if I should just wait it out and hope that it recovers or put the site back the way it was with Photobucket?
You have to wait for Google to re-index the images, which could take months. (I'm waiting for the image-bot also)
I hosted my images on Flickr and I'm taking it in house because I have never gotten any traffic from Google Image. It all goes to Flickr.
Speaking of images I'm experiencing some problems with images uploaded to blogger they just disappear for no reason.