I like the experiment, just probably using the Coop to conduct it might not past muster with a lot of the users
If they get passed I'll make a FAQ entry about the answer and you can refer them to that post But where would you draw the line? A PDF would be OK right? How about an image like a scan of a page with info, that's similar to a PDF. This makes me wonder, what's the rules in AdWords?
That's an excellent point actually... Personally, I HATE PDF's. If I have to look at them then I'll download it then open it in adobe reader. Not my browser window (That just makes my machine realll slow). So... In all honesty, I prob wouldn't allow a PDF in if I had my own way. I know some may object to that, but even the idea of my browser being hijacked like that pisses me off no end. It's just a bit of a pet peeve. But this isn't my network so it's not really my choice.
An interesting test, that would not raise many questions of "why...", is just to throw some weight at a thumbnails page containing the links to the *optimized* images. It wouldn't have the same effect, but will for sure make this page get massively spidered, and this might probably give some relevance to the images listed on it. What do you think... would you approve it in the Co-op? .
I've got a sandboxed site (not in sig) that is getting 10 times more visitors from Google Images than from the engine itself. Go figure.
It all depends, if a site is structured as a gallery, then people who want to find pictures should have galleries as a result.
This is usually the case with adult sites. Image searches don't convert nearly as well as regular ones in my experience because a lot of them are people looking for pictures to steal or use in forums.
That's true for the most part. However, I sometimes use it to search for images of people to see what they look like because I couldn't find it using the regular method.
I often use image search to find sites about obscure terms. Its real easy to scroll through a few images to find the one that matches my term than a few pages of text serps deciphering the description, Also I'd hate it if pdf were linked on ads. Looking for something interesting and get hit with a giant pdf would really keep me from clicking strange ads.