None of my images come up in google image search, yet googling the name of the nursery or handmade soap damask rose, for example, my site is usually the first link shown, but none of the images are listed at all, even with alt tags.
I want the images to show, that's a huge part of how people shop for plants or things like handmade soap.

I've been wondering if the sitemap generator I used did something screwy.
I have also begun to wonder if the /image/ directory SS decrees fools the google imagebot into thinking there are no images.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to direct the imagebot to where the images reside? Gooogle webmaster stuff is spectacularly unhelpful beyond suggesting signing up for the enhanced image search (which as a side note has diluted the accuracy of image searches but that is a different discussion!).

Should I use a different sitemap generator? I don't have a robots.txt file and google sounds like that is good if you want the whole site spidered, which I do. Is this incorrect?

Please, any suggestions as to how to unblind the images will really help. Thanks in advance---

Google is a law unto itself, so it's unlikely that you have done anything to prevent it from indexing your images.

The only possible thing I can think of is that you have a robots.txt file set to inhibit images. But you said you don't have that file.

I'm sure your directory structure is not a problem. Many people, not just SS users, keep images in folders, and "image" is a very common name for a folder.

Clear Alt tags would seem to be very important because how else would Google know what the image is of? I don't know how important the image file name is, but you would need to be careful here -- if you had great success, you might find Google linking directly to your images, rather than the pages containing the images.

What I am saying in a roundabout way is: "I don't know anything about this stuff"

I suggest try a Google search on this topic -- I have just discovered you are not alone

Also, check out this Search Engine Optimization Forum.

I've added a robots.txt file which allows all--take a while to know if that helps. It would seem redundant <re-dunce-dant> but with google, who knows. Their stats check pages show no problem with spidering, but I am really out of my depth here.
I will check out the seo forum, and if I find out anything useful I'll report it back here. It is aggravating to see that google has found my pages, but not the images on them.
But as I say, their image search has gotten very diluted in the past few months--botanical name searches for example bring up many things only related in that they are also plants--most of them! and so perhaps their imagebot has some other problems.
Thanks Bruceee.

As a user of Google services I would think it's fairly obvious that they have had some 'hidden' problems recently ... not an unusual occurrence for any big service provider! But like many big players, they tend to keep quiet about such issues as the vast majority of people will notice no/little difference and may well blame their own PC/ISP. So, they don't advertise it.

I would also say that certain Google services must be way behind at present ... but I can't go into the details of my suspicions. Suffice it to say that it's pretty obvious that there have been problems in some areas and that certain processes are well behind normal schedules.

However, Google has provided enhanced services to certain businesses - perhaps to pacify us due to recent problems? I don't know ... but I'm wary and pleased at the same time. The people I deal with at Google are absolutely superb and recently they have contacted me regularly (up to 3 times a day!) to offer help and support. The assistance I've received from Google has been excellent.

However, for a number of weeks certain problems have been very noticeable and I wouldn't think that the robots or spiders/crawlers have not been gathering what they normally would.

Nuff said! All will become well again, I'm sure ... er, hoping!! ;-)

mccifa

Google contacts you!? And there's no way for me to contact them. Evidently my piddling webmaster service account with them doesn't rate. I'd say there's more than a little wrong with their "service" when it's a one-way spigot. Searching through their google webmaster blog was hopeless--Bruceee's link to the seo opt forum has much more in it. I will be excerpting some of their pointers here later.

Seems if I have to wade through spam to be in touch with folks by email, google ought to be tough enough to try it as well.

Hi Paradisi

I wouldn't worry if I were you, LOL! I spend quite a lot of money each month with Google as an advertiser for some pretty large accounts which allocate a fair amount of dosh each month.

But I also dealt with much smaller accounts for a few years and Google ignored me as I obviously wasn't in the right league, LOL! Now I have a good mix of large, small and intermediate businesses that want somebody to advertise their sites properly for them and my monthly spend with Google must have reached their lower milestone.

The Google staff are brilliant .... extremely helpful and they provide direct access once you are on the ladder - they are just a phone call away and if they're busy they come back to you very quickly.

I wasn't even aware that such a service existed until I was contacted by them, once I must have crossed the invisible line. Anyway, they are there .... and very helpful too.

One of my clients gets around 7,000 hits a day from the ads and they must be getting a reasonable conversion rate, though they don't tell me,LOL!

Now, if I can only get to grips with building websites ... LOL!! It's so much more fun than my former life! Plus, new sites want visitors .... and Google can help when we know what we are doing .....

The whole thing is slowly coming together ... the advertising, site building with S-S, form-making and hopefully learning how to use databases etc behind sites. 'Tis great fun! If only I had been born later ...!!! ;-)

mccifa :-))

Here's what I have gleaned (thanks for the tip to that seo forum, Bruceee--the most detailed information I have found so far.)

My conclusions, from this reading, are these (and please folks correct me where I'm wrong or incomplete):

1). for any search engine to find an image, it must have a link to it. (ok, that should have been obvious I guess)
2). google thinks they taste better if they have alt-text.
3). jpg format is best, small but optimized from really good shots (we knew that part!)
4). captions to images help, or descriptions nearby for context-sensing
5). keyword rich text referring to same thing, on same page helps (duh)
6). using image names that have search words in them will be more helpful than "img00004"
7). page title & keywords referring to image words are also good
8). anchor text linking to image should be more descriptive than "click here" as relatively few will be googling for "click here".

-----------and if implementing some changes along these lines helps, I'll report back.

One big question for me is photo gallery pages, where there's no particular reason in the text to link to an image (in my case, photos of plants that may or may not be in the current year's catalog but are indicative of the range of plants I grow).
Would an index list to the images, with links to them, work?
Would it be perceived as spam for robots?
(And what a world we live in where I can write that last sentence and it's not nonsense!)

That is good stuff. It is interesting to note that the image file name matters too.

I think it is quite reasonable to have a text caption near each image (helps humans too!) You could use the image file name in the caption as a link to the image itself.

Your hot-linking protection will affect Google, because it means nobody, including Google, can hot link to your images. So if their spider goes to check that an image actually exists, it would get an "access denied" error. Is that enough to put it off indexing the image? Again I don't know the answer, but the SEO forum guys might.

I think it is quite reasonable to put an index of your images either on each page, or on a single page that covers your whole site. Repeating the image file name and extension, like "SomePlant.jpg" will do no harm, and may actually do some good

Google indexes the site fine, coming up on the first page of results in searches--and I can bookmark various pages and don't get the forbidden error (which sounds like a Victorian novel title), so the hotlink protection isn't preventing that stuff from being seen by google--why would it prevent images from being seen?
I've reported the problem to my host and they are percolating.

Why would hot-linking prevent images from being seen? If you were a human indexer, and you got a "forbidden" error when you tried to access an image, you would probably drop that image from your index. Now bots are not human -- so I don't if they work the same. I'm just raising that as a possibility -- hopefully one that doesn't happen

The opinion on those forums and others was generally that hotlink prevention measures (.htaccess blocking) prevents the google imagebot from seeing your images.

There is disagreement too about whether there is a good way to allow google and the google family of bots in, as the address of the imagebot changes (? is that true?).

Some say, allow google.com & googlebot will visit, some say no. My host help person thought it was a moving target and thus impossible to fully allow. Seems like there would be a block of addresses you could allow. . .
Mccifa, chime in here please if you have better information!

It seems Google would benefit if there were a way to allow it and disallow bandwidth stealing hotlinkers. You'd think if there were such a way, google would tell you.

With hotlink protection on, google's cache of my site has no images, only the blanks. Maybe there's a way to allow the cache? I'm working with cpanel and the interface doesn't allow me to add rules, just allow or disallow.

I think I'll raise the portcullis and then block hotlinking manually (if there is any) for the time being.

Doing a whois on my last googlebot hit shows that it came from an address in the range 66.249.64.0 to 66.249.95.255

I would think that an .htaccess statement of "allow 66.249" would allow any bot from google to have access to your directory. But then I do not know what is in your current .htaccess file.

Thanks for that.

I'm not so certain now that the photo needs a clickable link to it; I've done some comparison googling (try for example delphinium bluebird) and many of the images on the first page of results are not the result of clickable links. Is this perhaps facilitated by the images being called from the image directory? (I did some view source peeking.) The source code has the way to find the image, I guess google can follow that if there is exact text nearby or (more often directly) the alt tag.

That and not having hotlink protection on. As I don't have images of things one could buy on ebay, or things you wouldn't want your boss to see you looking at, I don't think my images are the sort of things that attract stealing.

After my modifications have time to take effect (how long is that?), I'll report back here (or would it be better to the web general area?)

I think you may as well continue with this current thread and keep it all together. I will certainly be interested to see the outcome of all this.

It looks like a good idea to remove hotlink protection at least for now. Keep reviewing the activity on your site, and if you see suspicious image activity, then would be the time to consider reinstating it.

The main purpose of preventing hotlinks is not to prevent someone from grabbing your images, but to prevent them from linking to them for display on their sites.

By using links to your images, someone can use your bandwidth for their own display purposes. Because images are far larger than textual HTML pages, they save bandwidth at your expense. This is especially bad if you are limited to xxMByte bandwidth a month and have to pay for any excess.

August update:
--still not a single image listed in the google image search directory. Their cache of my site (www.rareplantnursery.net) shows images, so it's not little red x's causing it.
--pages continue to come up in the first page or so of results, often the first item.
--mystifyingly and annoyingly, the site I build for our farmers market has images listed in google! Argh! I'm not doing anything more there, in fact less (no keywords or page descriptions, no alt text). (It's been a rushed summer). It is also newer--just put online in March. And I have not entered it in the google webmaster pages where I submitted my site, so google found it by itself, or from the link to it on my resource page, not by submission.

Anyone have any ideas what I may be doing wrong with the one site? Is all the advice on alt text, keywords & tags so much hokum? Have I offended the google image bot somehow?

I am getting orders for both plants and soaps via online searches, so humans are finding the site, but I'd really like to get my photos of plants and soaps out there for folks to see. I get in-person compliments on the beauty of the soaps and my packaging, so if online searchers could see them, I'm sure I'd get more sales.

Maybe I should strip all tags and keywords from a few pages, to see what that nets me.

I can't explain it, except to say Google works in mysterious ways

I would start by removing the whole "Keywords" meta tag -- I don't think that is of any use nowadays, and might boost your rating.

Also try renaming some images -- e.g instead of "del-perciv-wt.jpg", use "DelphiniumPercival".jpg. This gives a much closer match to your Alt tag. And, of course, don't use spaces in image file names. You have text nearby which repeats the Alt tag, so that should be a plus factor.

I'd leave Alt tags in place -- just about any source you find will recommend them. I'm in two minds about the "Description" meta tag though. I have seen references that indicate it may be going the same way as Keywords. But for now, I'd leave that in too.

One final point, irrelevant to your current problem: I suggest you use web-safe fonts. I see some text overlaps and odd spacing that I am sure you don't intend.

quote:

Originally posted by Bruceee:
I can't explain it, except to say Google works in mysterious ways

That would be my answer also, but here's something else to try. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, it's free, then opt in to their "Enhanced Image Search". Maybe that will get their attention. I wouldn't waste my time trying to tweak each picture, and they don't need a link. As long as they have alt text, you've done enough IMO. You're also right that captions with pictures seem to help even if they aren't directly attached like alt text.

Bruceee is dead right ... Google works in very mysterious ways. Google is always changing the ways in which it works. It's been highly frustrating for those of us on the Google Adwords front over the last few years and trying to keep up with the changes has been tricky, let alone anything such as optimisation.

As far as Googlebots etc are concerned, as a newbie to this (website construction and optimisation) I tried all sorts of things with two sites to get Google to clock everything properly. All I can say is, after you've set up your site in the best way you think you can, just sit back, relax and let Google (eventually) do it's own thing.

Google didn't do things in the order I expected and it didn't do things in one visit - it messed about over many weeks before it got things right. I will be making certain changes soon and will be interested to see how long it takes Google to recognise them!

Like you (the OP) I also have a webmaster account, set up a Google sitemap a short while ago for one site and tore my hair out over what Google was and was not doing. I then got busy on something else, didn't even do a site check for quite a while and when I went back to have a look, Google had eventually found everything and removed cached pages from a previous site.

As far as images are concerned, I now think the most important thing is to have a good image name. Some of the early images I put up in the first simple site I tried to put together do not have names which enable them to be displayed by Google when a search term is input.

EG, can I suggest you go to Google Images and search for 'hghsummcrd' or 'lrgswtpeacrd' - things which mean something to me and the owner/artist, but are highly unlikely to be searched on by anyone else.

You should find that an image by Sandy Shaw - of botanicalprints.co.uk appears - all on its own. (That site is pretty bad, BTW - first attempt!). There's nothing special about the image and what brought it up in Google is the name of the image - nothing else.

If I go back to Google Images and do a random search for say 'mussel' one of the images that comes up is 'Green Mussel' - with mussel in bold as that's the term I've searched for. If you look at the image itself, it has 'mussel' within the image filename.

The text under the photo is "Green Mussel - Perna viridis." which if you click the small image, go to the page, drop to the bottom to find the pic and mouseover, is the first part of the Alt tag.

However, look around on the results page (yours will probably be different to mine) and check out other images you will see some that have a part sentence cut with "..." after it, where Google appears to have extracted the text relevant to the image from the nearby page text - as there's no alt tag.

What relevance/weighting Google gives to the different components and how that is then affected by overall page rank I have no idea. As others have intimated, the way Google works is mysterious ... and it's always changing.

This is not a plug for me, but I can say that for commercial sites, Adwords can produce much better results than relying on optimisation. I have a new site almost ready to upload regarding my 'proper' work and in there I mention a client who has become a good friend, who with his partner paid £1,500 ($3,000?) twice to different optimisers and it made not one iota of difference to their results/business. But an Adwords campaign, targetted in the the right way, produced sensational results. Likewise another site which gets around 500 hits a day via search engines and external links, but gets 7,000 highly targeted hits per day via Adwords when the owners run it - but at a cost!

Adwords isn't easy ... if anyone tells you it is then they probably aren't doing it right and don't know enough about it! or have a very simple product/range ... but for the right sites it can be really helpful.

Optimisation can be useful, but many people owning sites will all be vying for the best 'free' position - and there have to be winners and losers. There were 46,000 images returned on Google for 'mussel' - goodness knows how many in the text section. In a competitive market being off the front page can be an expensive cost.

After looking into this, I will be changing all of my images to ensure that the filenames and tags have 'relevance' in future, where it is required and to ensure that when people search they get what they want. But it may not be easy: that 'hghsummcrd' (high summer card) will do nothing if I change its name to highsummercard.jpg (high? summer? card?) - but I have to assess what will be best ... the English/Latin names for the flowers? The name of the artist? The site name 'botanicalprints'? Then the tag and text around it to ensure Google likes it when the search term is used. Which of these terms (if at all) is input into search engines the most? How many competitors are there using similar terms? So, am I better off going for the common or uncommon terms as far as 'results' are concerned? At the end of the day I want 'buyers' not 'viewers' for that site. Unlike with Adwords, I can't have options! So, if I want it to 'work' I have to get it right.

Sorry - long post and I hope my interpretation of what I've noticed on Google Images this afternoon is correct. If anyone can help with any other info or correct any errors above then, probably like the OP, I'd be more than grateful!

Thanks.

mccifa