Is it worth being indexed in Google images? I note that several times I have found other webmasters who are hot linking to my images and given that Google images is one of the top referrers I suspect they are finding their stolen content by using this tool. On the other hand though in some cases they are ripping me off - I wonder if it also is bringing other traffic to my site. Anyone have an opinion on this?
Google images is great exposure. I always use unlimited bandwidth hosting so I like it when people hotlink images.
It depends upon you niche. Example, if your site is a celebrity fan site or an adult site, the google image traffic will convert very poor compared to regular search traffic. Why don't you protect yourself from hotlinking? Use htaccess or if you are using cpanel, you can do directly from there.
The site I am on is a Windows host written in ASP - so no cpanel - do you know if htaccess works for IIS sites?
I am getting some decent traffic from google images. In fact, for one of my sites, 90% of the traffic comes from google images. And it's thousands of uniques per month.
I have not experimented with this, but following logic, would disabling hot linking not disable the images from being listed in google images from the start?
On one of my sites I had a picture of Victoria Beckham & since last week I have been getting like 1500 - 2000 hits a day from that one picture from google images.
But do these hits amount to anything? I hear about hits and traffic but really aren't they just sucking bandwidth? Does any of this convert seeing as how the images themselves are being shown on Google? I guess the framepage version where they click to see the full image might bring traffic ... What I am finding, however, is that some folks are then hotlinking images which is really the problem. I wonder if the Google images traffic really amounts to enough repeat visits to make the hotlinking worth the indexing.
I run several blogs, each post has an avatar with name, alt and title tags filled with main keyword of that post, or general keyword of the blog. In fact it drives about 10% (sometimes more) of my traffic.