Google Image Search Optimization

[focker]

Has anyone looked into optimizing the system for Google Image Search?

A couple suggestions...

The image titles on mouseover should not be watered down with "click here to view".
There should be an alt tag on every image link that includes the keywords for the image, not the title of the filename.

Notice, when you google for this image Tailgaters2.jpg on my site, you get

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-04%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=Tailgaters2.jpg

Great, it shows up.

But when you google image search that title...

http://images.google.com/images?q=Tailgaters2.jpg&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-04,GGLD:en&sa=N&tab=wi

One pic, and its not mine. Goodle Images likes keywords in the alt tag. If the Alt tag had Tailgate Hottie Carolina Panthers in it as opposed to tailgaters2.jpg I believe it would get indexed and get plenty of hits.

Great web app by the way, we are really enjopying it.

Thoughts?

[Tranz]

I think that is a good suggestion to put keywords or descriptions in the alt tags.

[focker]

I think that is a good suggestion to put keywords or descriptions in the alt tags.

Thanks.


I went ahead and made a small change to the displayimage.php file.

It now reads:

Code Select Expand

$pic_html .= "<img src=\"" . $picture_url . "\" class=\"image\" border=\"0\" alt=\"{$CURRENT_PIC_DATA['keywords']}\" /><br />";

Here it is in action....

http://www.panthershuddle.com/photos/displayimage.php?album=random&cat=0&pos=-203

Notice now on mouseover the keywords of the pic are shown on mouseover and listed in the alt tag for the image in the source.
This SHOULD help google index the picture correctly and get more hits. Now instead of people having to search for the pictitle.jpg on google to find it, they can find it by just searching for carolina panthers fans (hopefully),

I'll let you know how it works out in a few weeks.

[kegobeer]

You might want to check out this article at Googlerank.  Alt keywords that aren't anywhere else on the page don't influence Googlebots.  You would be better off putting in description/title text instead, IMO.

Case in point: I went to your site, found pictures with titles, and Googled for them.  They all were ranked fairly well.  Same thing on my site, but I found my rankings higher than yours, even though I have less images than you.  Basically, the more traffic you have, and the more places on the net your URL is displayed, the more bots you get.  I post on a bunch of different forums, and I always have my site in my signature and/or profile.  I get noticed that way, plus I get a lot of extra traffic from places all over the world, which certainly can't hurt.   

The best tags in the world can't help a site that doesn't get looked at.  For small sites, I don't think this matters at all, because it won't draw in any bots.  For large sites that already get a lot of traffic, this isn't a necessity.  Exposure is the best way to get crawlers.  Of course, this is just my opinion. 

[focker]

I'm not talking about the normal google web search indexing, that seems to be working great with coppermine.

I am talking about google image search, the search that returns the actual images in the search page.

Read this article...

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-20040513HowToOptimizeYourImagesForImageSearch.html

It seems all of my coppermine pages were indexed in the normal google text search, which is great. But not one image was indexed in the google image search. Why is that?

[kegobeer]

I don't know.  I tried the Google image search for several of my images that have titles, and they all show up at or near the top of the list.  I still think that my previous points apply to the image search.  It certainly can't hurt to add good titles to your pictures and wait a few weeks to see if your images are indexed better.

[focker]

I did an image search on google for all images from within my domain, none from coppermine showed  up even though I know for a fact those pages were crawled as they show up for a regular web search (not image search). So google takes in the text for web search , but ignores the images for image search. I think much of it has to do with the title and alt tags in the code.

[focker]

I found this interesting post on another message board....

One of the things that has abounded the past 12 months is 'Googletapping' and the optimisation of code to improve sites search engine performance. On this score nuke has surpassed all expectations and my own sites do brilliantly in google searches and the bots are my friends...

But what about the 1000+ gallery images that my members have added, described and keyworded.. well from what I make out Google ignores them completely. I'm talking about Google image search here.

Having trawled through Google's technical pages, and enquired directly with them, the problem arises because nuke/coppermine never provides a 'true' link to the actual image. In effect a url that results in the image and nothing else.

If there is any place to ask if this is a consideration for future development then it is surely here?

So maybe google image search ignores coppermines images because they don't have an actual url?

[kegobeer]

I don't think so, since Google Image Search works fine with my site.  I really think it has a lot to do with supplying a title to your images and letting Google crawl your site.  Again, how much Google crawls your site also plays a large part (I get crawled at least once a day, so I'm sure that's why I have such good luck with Google searches).

Do a Google Image Search for "Grandpa, Augie, and Mason".  My site comes up with links to the image and two others in close proximity to it on one particular page.

[DustyNine]

Definitely an interesting topic. I get great rankings for Google normally, but Google Image Search ignores my photo galleries almost completely. I'm tempted to edit the displayimage and thumbnails pages to make it show the title at least. Would be interested to hear if anyone else has seen improved search results in GIS after making any changes.

[Aeronautic]

This is touched on in part in this thread

However, I'll add my two cents that for SEO and GIS purposes, solid ALT tags are very important. There is/was a hack around here (which I can't find at the moment) to stick the title or some other item like keywords in there instead of the "click to view..." default.

If you or your users use keywords or the title fields each time, it should not matter too much which field gets the nod me thinks. Just pick one and stick with it. I use the title 'cause that also shows up on the page title so you end up with it on the page title, on page and in the alt tag - good SEO.

[Deus]

Sorry to dig up such an ancient thread.
I'm curious, whats the best way about getting better image search in google?
Is it the filename that matters? or Keywords?
I assume from my searches in the past that it is down to the actual file name.
Keywords I think work better for standard google search.

I think it comes down to how you want visitors to recognise and come to your site by using google.
I know this topic is in the 1.3.x support forum, but is'nt it still valid for all later itterations too?

[Joachim Müller]

Locking.