Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Can someone explain why I get a mass amount of referrals from Google images rather than Google itself? Are they one in the same? Is this a benefit or a detriment?


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

Benefit.

They are searching for your products directly by their images, rather than searching words.

It means you have your site set up right!

The name (file name) of your image(s) must be a popular search term.

~Roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

It`s not the image name, it`s the alt tag.

Vincent ... I`m curious to know what the referrer is. In the string, it should say what they are looking for. I`m just wondering because I tried several of your tags and can`t find you in the searches, so what images are popping up? That is an unusual discrepancy.

Craig, Google does have some new tools to help them index you better.

They are ... beta at best. But at least they are working on it?

That`s good to know! But my problem isn`t so much getting indexed...that only demonstrated the problem. Instead, it`s the number of times I`m finding a great image to use, but it doesn`t exist. The thumbnail does, in Google`s database, but the underlying image has gone away and Google is too stupid to know.

Vincent, another really weird thing, related. Kathy`s done a couple of searches on signal flag banners on Images and found results that point to her eBay ads. The thing is, they`re ads that expired months and months ago!

eBay doesn`t (I think?) allow Google bots to crawl their auctions unless they`re in a store. That`s fair enough, but then how come those dead and buried ads show up under both Images and regular search results? Nobody knows. :-D Is it helpful? No....EXCEPT that those ads now include a link to a live, online brochure.

I was speaking to Buddah about this, the other day. From his perspective, along with the other gods and demigods, they`re using it as a new Gameboy theme. For eons they`ve had that game, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" It`s still a big seller, but the newest hot item in Valhalla is, "How do search engine results correlate to reality?"

Actually, it is both.  Google will pick up the image based upon th eimage file name and also based on the alt image tag.

~Roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

OK... I don`t know how else to show this, so I am writing the entire Referral Address here. Of course only a couple of them...
One
  http://images.google.co.za/imgres?imgurl=http://www.elusivet reasures.com/mc_images/product/image/VN018.gif&imgrefurl =http://www.elusivetreasures.com/c44/Magnolia-Flower-Branch- p93.html&h=300&w=300&sz=38&tbnid=CI_3h4fWYHQ bqM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=116&hl=en&prev=/images%3F q%3DFlower%2Bdecor%26start%3D20%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26h l%3Den%26sa%3DN&frame=small
Two
  http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.elusivetre asures.com/databaseimages/EG005_t.gif&imgrefurl=http://w ww.elusivetreasures.com/store.cfm%3FCFID%3D6186835%26CFTOKEN %3D51354675%26d%3D3267%26c%3D5341%26do%3Dlist&h=108& w=108&sz=5&hl=ko&start=60&tbnid=SwGgYLaEm0fF gM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=85&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dartisans% 2Bin%2BEgypt%26start%3D40%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10 %26hl%3Dko%26sa%3DN

This is information gathered from Extreme tracker. You can find the link at the bottom of my website`s home page. Then under "Referral one"

My images are not titled properly. They are titled by product catalog number. That`s an issue from a couple years ago that I have not yet addressed.

Anyway, I appreciate the comments. I would like to understand this. Hopefully the knowledge can be applies to text as well...??...??


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

The first one came from a search of "flower decor".
The second from "artisans in Egypt" but it looks like it`s a foreign language?
I`m just reading the URL ... I didn`t click on them.

I went to your site, and your alt tags are working for them. I don`t know why you don`t think they are titled properly. What title are you referring to? I see the actual name in all the alt tags.

Hmm...I wonder if Google is getting more sophisticated now, and indexing page text to the found images? In that case, "surrounding" text would then be "captured" as something like a keyword field in the SE database?

That might explain how this is working. If that`s the case, it really makes an argument for non-Flash sites, and perhaps even associating content with images by how close that text is to the image on a page? Just speculating at the moment.