New Member - Disappearing pix and big web crawl
oregontapir
My name is Sheryl. I've been posting on the "official" Google
webmaster site, appreciating Webado's help, and I'm glad I finally
found this board. I've been working on an issue since last night, and
stayed up until 6 am trying to pin it down. I'm not convinced the
problem has been found, but I have some new tools, thank you. Bad
Neighborhood may have been helpful, but was also confusing. More later
on that and on my final assault on validating and cleaning up code on
the rest of the site.
Webado, sorry to repeat myself, the question of the day is at the end
of the post.
Briefly, most of the approx. 5,500 photos on my 1,000+-page site have
disappeared from Google's Moderate and Safe searches (using image
search) in the last 2 weeks, although they now show up well in the non-
filtered search. For the past couple years, they've been impossible to
find on the Safe OR Non-filtered searches, but my product and travel
pix usually came up in #1 and #2 spot on the Moderate image search.
The text search seems unaffected and we're doing great for our
keywords.
What I noticed today is that on October 27, Google searched what looks
like the entire site in one or two days. I haven't seen that deep a
search for months or maybe since last year. Unlike last year (when we
had hundreds of code and link errors), it breezed right through the
site quickly. However, it seems to have found something it didn't like
related to the pictures. Not sure if it thought we were porn, or
somehow linked with too much incoming commercialism such as eBay. It
found a few links from my own blogs to my own web pages, and I'm in
the process of rel=nofollow-ing them. There are only maybe 20 such
links max.
COULD IT HAVE BEEN A SINGLE PAGE WITH A FEW OBJECTIONABLE WORDS? The
product was a stuffed animal insect (louse). The description, while
not prurient, was scientifically accurate about lice, included words
such as pu*ic, body hair, and su*king (blood), and the scientific
name, which repeated the pu*is word. Could Google have found this
page, which was new as of Oct 25 (?) and decided to check up on the
entire site? If so, it would have found that this was the only page
with a few biological words this explicit, and the rest of the site
was about toys, animals, and trips. Would this have been enough to ban
our photos, and if so, why the pix and not the text? Thanks for any
help. Does Google periodically crawl the entire site, or did I extend
the invitatio with a few questionable words?
www.tapirback.com
Still confused in Oregon
webado
I personally block all robots from my images (personal preference).
But we have seen other people bringing the same kind of problems up
concerning images, so perhaps this is a Google glitch.
Also the different datacenters may be the problem, with some of them
perhaps not havign your images at all.
I can't do anything at the moment, being at work at my day job.
oregontapir
comments over the next few weeks or months. If you do get a chance to
check up on the query, I'd be interested.
One question for you. If you block robots from your images, what about
all the people who are now using images to search the web? Or do you
feel that enough people find you via the text. I don't know how many
people search by images, but I do it often, and my stats and customers
tell me it's common these days. Google seems to be pushing it also.
I've begun to add image title tags in my newer pages and to put them
into my older pages when I update. Maybe it helps.
Thanks.
Sheryl