Google images dropping photos

[Ron Niebrugge]

I’m a photographer with a photo based website that seems to do fine with Google’s web search. I used to receive a large number of visitors from Google Images as well. Last August, all my images were removed from the Google Images database, and have failed to reappear since. If I do a search of my URL on Google Images, I get the message “Results 1 - 1 of about 1,690” – the one photo is a photo link to my site from someone else. Since it says “of about 1,690”, it makes me think Google is aware of my images, but chooses not to include them.

I know of a few other professional photographers with large image based websites that had their images removed at about the same time last summer as well.

In July, I had added a footer to each page of my site including some copyright language. I have noticed the other sites that have had photos removed had similar footers, so I removed the footer thinking possibly they were removing my photos due to copyright lawsuit concerns, but that hasn't helped. If anyone can shed some light on this I would appreciate it – I have searched everywhere I can’t find anything written about this issue

[dannysullivan]

Ron, a couple of things.

First, I think you're typing your site name like this in:

http://images.google.com/images?q=ww...tureimages.com

And getting those 1,700 matches with only one shown. That's odd -- but that's also not showing the matches from your site. Look at the image -- it comes from galeriegate.com.

Instead, use advanced image search:

http://images.google.com/images?as_s...com&safe =off

And that shows no matches for your site at all. Here's a query for images about Denali and your site that should have brought up something:

http://images.google.com/images?as_q...s.com&safe=off

Nope, nothing.

I thought perhaps you might have accidentally blocked images through a robots.txt file or the meta robots command (covered here), but that shows nothing.

Looking for your robots.txt file, however, I got a message that you moved servers recently. When? It could be that if you had a delay when moving, Google came to check on your images, found them gone and dropped them.

The odd thing is that any changes you made shouldn't really have had an impact. That's because the image database is months out of date, last refreshed Google says in February. So even if you added things in July, that wouldn't have been registered.

Of course, it doesn't explain why you still were dropped. I'm following up on some Google Images stuff as part of the issue about Iraqi prisoner abuse photos disappearing (more on that and the out-of-date index here). I'm wondering if they had a more current database, then rolled back to an older one for some reason.

Do you recall the first time you noticed getting serious traffic from Google Images or when exactly you first discovered the traffic drop-off and drop?

[Ron Niebrugge]

Danny, thank you for taking the time to look at this. Your rollback theory may make the most sense, and has been something I have wondered myself. Since I changed servers in April, I don’t have access to my old stats, but it seems like I started seeing activity from Google Images last winter, but I can’t be sure. I was dropped from Google at the end of July or beginning of August, again my stats don’t allow me to pin it down exactly. If Google only indexes images every 6 months, the timing might be about right.

Referrals from Google Images make up such a small percentage of overall visitors, most photographers probably wouldn’t realize if they had their images dropped – especially if it was only the images added since the last crawl. Here are the only ones I have heard of:

The owner of http://www.my-spot.com claims to have had 6 months of great activity from Google Images, then all were removed the last week of July. The owner of www.slrobertson.com also had strong images ranking for months if not more, then also had all his images removed at the end of July. I have heard www.danheller.com also had his images removed, but I don’t know the specifics.

If Google did a roll back at the end of July, that may explain why the Iraqi prisoner photos disappeared as well, didn’t that happen in June?

I suppose in my case there isn’t much I can do but wait for Google to come around again.

I should also mention, my new web host had me separate my images into multiple folders in April. After doing this, I started getting lots of file not found errors from people using Google Images, so I placed copies all my images back into the original folder – once I did this, Google Imges was working fine until August, so I don’t think that was a factor, but it is worth mentioning because I may be wrong.