In response to JimAtArtsnovaDotCom, I will be talking about image
search and rankings. To get us all on the same page, here is a quick
recap of what's going on at his site:
"1) Google has indexed all my web site pages and blog pages
2) I use alt and title tags for all images
3) All my images (blog and website) reside in the same physical
directory
4) All pages (blog and website) use full path names to target the
images (as opposed to relative path names)
5) My web pages are 100% W3C compliant
6) Most blog pages are newer than the web pages
Then WHY has Google indexed 100% of the images that appear on my blog
and not one single image that appears on my web site???"
Good question: Why is it that Google sometimes indexes a portion of
your images but not all of them? The first thing I would check in
this situation is to make sure that hosted images are discoverable,
crawlable, indexable, and not being blocked by SafeSearch. To do
this, go to images.google.com/ and do an image site search i.e.
[site:picasa.com]. To check if images might be blocked by SafeSearch,
click the link below the search box to toggle your SafeSearch
settings. Fortunately images are appearing in image search results
without any SafeSearch issues which also means that Google is able to
properly access and index content from that website. Check out how to
make Google friendly sites here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349
So we now know Google can properly reach and index images from the
site, but why aren't all the images also included in image search? We
have to remember that image rankings and inclusions come from many
factors beyond alt text and title tags. Image rankings also consider
the ranking of the parent or linking page, meaning that if the parent
or linking page does not provide enough information or rank well, then
Google may not have enough confidence to serve those images as results
to our users.
As recommendations for appearing in image search results, I highly
suggest that everyone follow Jim's example in following best practices
with using proper and meaningful alt text, titles, and useful file
naming. You also want to consider how unique and compelling the
content is beyond the image itself, with the context and information
surrounding it. Be very, very patient as changes do often take some
time, meanwhile continue to provide relevant content for your users
and things should eventually work out.
Cheers,
Evan
