For far too long, I've been using Dreamweaver, letting it write the code, and using tables for layout. Once I broke the template my site is based on, I started making my changes by hand, writing the code myself, getting rid of 1/3 of the "weight" from each page, and using divs with CSS to do my layout. And since I've been changing everything anyway, I built transparent png frames for all of my photos. But they have some graphic elements that need to go in front of the photos to look good, so I've been using the pngs in the img's src attribute, and calling the jpeg photograph using inline styles as a background image. So far Google Images has been the #2 search engine, sending me more traffic than MSN and Yahoo combined. Should I work out another way to show my images, or will GoogleBot understand what I'm trying to do?
I'm as confused as anyone else about Google Images. I can't get them to index me at all, even though I get 300-500 visitors from Google daily. I'd build a test page and see what happens ... Anita
Interesting ... Google Images has consistently been my #2 search referral, more traffic than MSN and Yahoo together. I'm kind of nervous. This is the new image: And this is the background image: You can see them together in my Seattle gallery, or really any gallery on my site. I made these changes before I realized it might have any effect, so instead of a test page, I have a test site. But I don't know if I want to wait around for the answer...?
It's not semantically correct to code content pictures as background - though I can see why you would want to do that in this case. Since they are different per page, they should be included as <img> in the content. I would be very surprised if google picked this up well. In general background images aren't different per page, and aren't interesting either. So google would be very unwise to index them at all. Given that google knows what pictures are about, generally, by the description given in the img-element: how would google know to show your 'background' images?
I've been wondering about that myself ... how would they know? Really, only by visiting my site, inspecting the code, and making an exception in their algorithm ... and there's no way I'm important enough for them to do all that for me, especially without begging. So it seems like I really ought to change it. That's a good point about semantic abuse. I guess I could achieve the same thing with absolute positioning and z-indexing, to put the photos themselves in the src attribute, and a div or span with a background image in front of it. Unless anyone can suggest a better way, that's less of a hack?