How often does Google update their Google Images? I was checking my logs today and noticed a ton of referrals from Google Images. I've been checking Images itself on and off for the last 2 months or so, and saw no movement until today, when it added a ton of images from my site. Since my site is pretty image heavy, I should benefit greatly from this. Anyone else?
Ive seen google images go up within a day of posting. I think like anything else, PR dictates how often you get crawled and in turn - how often you get indexed, including images.
I'm still not convinced its good traffic - I get lots from Google Image searches, thousands a month - but how much of that converts is anyone's guess. My perception is that my sites (and most sites) load slower in the Google Image frame - anyone else noticed this or am I just paranoid? But if you want to makesure you get good listings - be descriptive with your file naming and alt tagging i.e. welsh-assembly-building-cardiff.jpg alt: The Welsh Assembly Building in Cardiff Bay, Wales. johnny-depp-smoking-cigarette.jpg alt: Johnny Depp smoking a cigarette on the set of his latest movie. Not only does that do good stuff for your images getting indexed, but its great for people whouse screen readers or have images turned off. All the time I see people using image names like: smlft01.jpg alt: man
One of my heaviest trafficed sites is also image heavy and I too get a ton of hits and visitors from Google Images - who is often one of my biggest referrers. For example, when someone searches for olsens bikini in Google Images, my site is well represented and this often brings visitors to the site looking for more. My experience is that Google Images updates on average about every 120-150 days and has nothing to do at all with PR. The site I'm speaking of is only a PR3 and has gone from having a few hundred indexed images to over 3300.
Again with the olsens link I saw an update yesterday/last night on images.google.ca but no longer seeing it. Can anyone who's seen an update post the datacenter they're seeing it at?
I'm seeing it on the main google (google.com) which I use. I'm not sure if it slows my site down, as some have mentioned, but the number of referrers I'm getting off it is more than worth it. Although I have to say, a lot of the images that are sending me visitors aren't even on my site anymore! I.e. Google seems to have cache my old images, as I've replaced a lot of them on the site. No matter, as long as they bring visitors, I'll start making the alt tags more descriptive from now on. Should benefit me in visitors in the future.
In the future, when someone asks what datacenter you can go to command prompt (in winblows) and enter ping google.com then you can report it. Would be helpful as some people aren't seeing the new results yet.