Google images - what is

what is the value of having Google save your images to their database?

Are there any benefits other than the obvious of traffic

Do any of you block images via .htaccess

mmm

yes

its

round

 

i would love to know too, because I see quite a few of my images in there and being linked to. Wonder if I should block them or not

 

they cache your image so it doesn't effect your server but more the chance of others hotlinking to the image or simply just using your image

are those searching for images the kind of persons you want trawling your site

good user bad user

 

I figure it doesn't matter unless it starts to effect bandwidth with people actually linking to your images, but if you have bandwidth to spare and it doesnt get out of hand, i figure a hit it a hit and there is still a bit of potential of drawing people from it.

 

so you would be happy with the hotlinking, then

 

I am for now as long as it doesnt get out of control

 

i agree. i used to block images and do not anymore as it is not a huge bandwidth drain.

 

I don't know .. the jury is still out on this one for me

 

I have an affiliated site that gets the majority of its traffic from Google via its images. You can easily rank better for images than site content in the same search engine, namely Google. If you have a good, descriptive alt tag, your image may rank #1 for image results, whereas your site might rank on page 5 or 6 for the same term in the normal SERPs.

 

the question though will having highly ranked images in the google image search, help the site in anyway?

 

Why not even use images as a tool for gaining traffic? If you want to draw people to your site because of the keywords you use, and ads you show why not utilize images to do that also. Make their names friendly to the content you have. Instead of DSC0293830.gif make it awesome-keyword-payout.gif and it might have a better effect.

 

The value is to those that visit the fine site: goyk.com to do Google Searches like this one for "phat" http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&biw=1004&q=phat

 

I see the jury are getting close to a decision

 

I definatly see a positive trend in traffic for some of my sites. My personal photogallery sees almost no referers from google images (files are named DSC12321.JPG), however one of my travel sites does where I have named the images <resort>.jpg.

Its possible to SEO google image traffic, and it gives traffic. I dont see a problem with people hotlinking images really either since it might be positive aswell (who says google doesn't weight that in for instance..). Not that I'm saying it _is_ positive, just that nobody knows, and it could be..

 

Blocking the image bot blocks your images from Froogle.

At least that's what Google told me a few months ago.

 

How do you block the images from being grabbed by Google using the .htaccess? I have images that I want to sell (flowers, mountains, etc) so I don't want them to be readily available in google images.

Kierslee

 

yes htaccess or cpanel has a feature called hot-linking protection which you can turn on

 

One of my sites gets virtually all its traffic due to its images. Fortunately, some folks like what they see when they get there, and they do enough clicking to make it worthwhile.

 

Just make sure it doesn't disable any of your (intentional) 3rd party links.

 

You can also put your website name on the images, so that when they are hotlinked you get free advertisement on their site.

Although that isn't much.

I currently get more hits/referrals from Google (Images) than Yahoo!, MSN, and Google combined.

And I think that is what is keeping us afloat.