Traffic From Google Image Search: Re-Claiming Your Visitors
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Ok, just a tiny trick for today. This one is complicated, but I also wanted to explain why it’s important.
About Image Searches
Image searches suck. Almost all of them. But they are still constantly used. This is a rare occasion on the web.
Anyone who’s used Google image search has probably realized 2 things.
- Do not include the word “fat” in any search if safesearch is off.
- Google image search can be gamed quite easily, and is terribly inaccurate.
Why Can It Be Gamed So Easily? Why is it so inaccurate?
Because there’s very little data they can have for images. They have your on page textual elements/pages linking to that site(rarely indicative of the image’s content), filename, and alt text. The latter 2 being the easiest to manipulate, but at the same time pretty relied on. Don’t believe me? Take a look (example - and no, I’m not the guy in the 1st picture). Optimal? Not so much. Not their fault really, just a lack of data. So they’re forced to rely on the fact that I was even mentioned on the site.
So get stuffing dem tags! (or actually in many niches you can get traffic w/o stuffing)
But XMCP, Google Image Traffic is Worthless!
Google violated a very important unspoken agreement they had with Webmasters.
“We give you content to index Google, and we don’t sue you to frequently for caching it without our permission. In exchange, you give us traffic”
So what did we get? Our page framed, and a speedy little link to “Full Size Image” that leads to our bandwidth, and is almost always clicked. Worthless traffic.
So what do we do? Break the frame.
Breaking The Frame - Note: This may have implications for other services, so add in your own code to check referrer if you’re sensitive about such things.
<script language=”Javascript”>
if(parent.location != self.location)
{
parent.location=self.location;
}
</script>
EDIT: While my site still gets traffic like this, it’s been suggested that Google eventually drops the image traffic. So Put that in an external JS, restricted by Robots.txt
That’s all there is to it.
A Little Fun More Towards the Dark Side…
You knew it was coming. Try this one. Load up pictures of music artists, with proper alt tags and whanot. Instead of sending them to self.location, try a ringtone landing page for that artist. Crap, if you’re sensitive you can even include the picture on the page. I’m pretty sure this is outside of G’s “guidelines” or whatever, but I’m also pretty sure manual reports would be low.
-XMCP
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I can probably figure this out myself if i thought about it for a few minutes, but you can probably do it quicker…
A script to redirect to a page with that image neatly placed between some adcents ads. How would this be accomplished?
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Dynamically?
parent.location=’http://www.mysite.com/index.php?image=img.jpg’;
Then just have that page load the image url out of the $_GET[’image’];, and shove the adsense on there
After cleaning the data to stop XSS of course.
Or you could parse the image they’re looking at out of the referrer, and use that as the GET variable.
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Does anyone have any idea on whether or not Google will get unhappy about frame breaking and thus penalize a site in the Image search results.
Just simple frame breaking, not the dodgier redirects to advertisers.
April 22nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
also, this will eliminate user frustration when they try to hit the back button only to land on the framed page which gets broken again
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
for those that care about that
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
woops, tried to put that in code tags but screwed something up
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I have found that using images pushes bandwidth overages. I don’t like sharing images and have found little use in sharing them. As far as breaking the frame… I haven’t tried myself. I have seen methods like the one above before. I am not sure if it really does anything good.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 am
I was getting 600 hits a day with this just before last xmas as I ranked first image in google for a “present” - really works but the bigger popularity words do get rejigged quite often if your completely bogus.
Also the first two people in that photo are Chris Moiles and Dude from foo fighters?!
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
This is a great article. Puts the final piece of a puzzle together for me!
April 24th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Cheers XMCP [what does that stand for btw?]
Can we look forward to a post on gaming / optimizing for google images?
April 25th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
in tests I’ve done with frame breakers, it seems to actually kill off my image search traffic… my guess is google is aware of the code and drops sites that it finds that code on… obfuscated code might help, didn’t try that one myself…
April 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Amending the entry to include external JS. My site is still live though.
May 8th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I’ve been using this technique for quite a while now and still getting butt loads of traffic from google image search. Works particularly well with funny image sites and adult sites….
May 28th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Wie man die Google Bildersuche austrickst…
Die Bildersuche von Google bringt den meisten Webmastern nicht viel mehr als Traffic, Traffic der nicht konvertiert. Doch mit ein paar kleinen Tricks lässt sich dieser Traffic sehr gut zu Geld machen.
Die Google Bildersuche austricksen
Der Slightl…
June 23rd, 2008 at 6:28 am
Is not that you lose Google Image traffic. It will appear under direct traffic instead of “images.google.com”, so it loses the referral part because of the frame breaker. At least that’s what I’m noticing in one of my sites: I search for one of my pictures, click on them, the frame breaker quicks in and my stats counter shows it like “no referral”. Don’t know if I making any sense here, English isn’t my first language
June 25th, 2008 at 8:00 am
[…] Some websites use this technique to keep the user on their page and not allow them to return to the Google Image serp listing. Google could not like this behavior and might remove your image from their index so I do not recommend it. Some people say it would not affect your listings but I’d be too afraid to try it out! You can find more info about Breaking the Google Image frame Here. […]