Google images traffic: good, bad or ugly?

[Mogga]

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Is google images traffic useful to your site?
These are some referrers from just one day to my site.



images.google.com / referral

images.google.co.uk / referral

images.google.no / referral

images.google.si / referral

images.google / organic

images.google.at / referral

images.google.ch / referral

images.google.com.br / referral
images.google.cz / referral

images.google.hu / referral
images.google.lt / referral
images.google.fr / referral

[gadget]

I find it a real pain. Traffic spikes raise expectations of good new traffic, but then you find its people just looking to steal your images.

[rdunton]

yea 1 of my sites currently recieves around 120-180 uniques a day frm google images, any way we can stop this happening? The traffic is absolutely useless.

[moredial]

If it is not Google sending students looking for images for their projects then it is some scraper bot looking to harvest your images to sell somewhere else.

Image searches are also used by copyright owners looking for illegal infringing copies - using an image for commercial advantage without the permission of the copyright owner is a criminal offence in the UK.

The simple option is to have all images in the same directory and just include the following line in robots.txt.

Useragent: *
Disallow: /images/

And use the htaccess file to block the IP address of any bot that ignores the disallow.

Images are a lot of your bandwidth costs so limiting access to real visitors can save a lot of money on busy sites.

[Azam.net]

I personally wouldn't block all access to images traffic, but you're right it can be a hog on bandwith.

Was once ranked number one in Google image search for an actor and got flooded with traffic. Had to keep buying more and more bandwidth. But no matter how hard I tried to sell relevant DVDs, books, posters etc. hardly anybody was buying. So it's the only time in my life I had to de-SEO a web-page, so that it didn't rank so well.

[mikey_freedom]

Agree with Azam.net that you shouldn't block all access. I think a lot of it boils down to the quantity of images and the type of site in question. I'm sure there are quite a few people on here who have had real luck with an image or two but are staying quiet on this thread.

Not all the traffic it generates is useless imho. If it was then a couple of sites I've got that get virtually all their traffic from a few images would have an EPM of zero. They don't. The EPM's pretty small but there is Adsense and other revenue meaning they pay their way. They were put up and forget sites, where the content will be as relevant in five years as it was when the pages were written. Okay, I intend to add to them but the current traffic is higher than I'd anticipated for them at this stage, mainly because a few of the images hit the top row for longtail search terms. These are pretty niche sites in a specific industry so this won't hold true for all types of website and images but I'm sure you can work out which might stand a chance and which will only ever generate useless image traffic.

We had the #1 spot for placename map (holiday destination) in image search for a few months. It really spiked the traffic to the site in question and although it wasn't all great, both affiliate and adsense revenue increased during the period. Overall the EPM was down but total earnings were up. For the extra couple of hundred quid it probably brought in, Google was welcome to slurp up the images it wanted.

One thing I've done for ages is to at least try and print the site URL in the corner of an image. Not as obtrusive as a watermark but at least it means your URL is visible on the thumbnail in the images search results and also it makes life a little bit of a pain for anyone trying to rip off your images.

If you are having bandwidth issues then why not try blocking off the bots from the majority but have a few accessible images that are relevant to the domain and site topic. I can see where the sheer volume of images would rack up your data transfer so again I'd look at this on a site-by-site basis.

Finally, and this isn't for the OP but for newbies, don't keyword spam the image <alt> text. This is a situation where less really can mean more.

[kcheung]

i get a lot of image searches, i'm no expert at bots and that kind of thing, but when i have done the research, i've found that users actually end up spending quite some time on my sites, this being said, in context, most of my sites are blogs and ppl come to them to look at interesting images so i guess in my case its a benefit.

[JohnnyCash]

In almost every case, anyone landing on your site via google image search will not load any page - they will just suck your bandwidth and move on.

You can use Javascript to force them out of the Google frame and onto your site - don't expect them to read any articles or buy anything though.

The thing with doing this, it can either be a positive or a negative depending on what you are trying to do. It will inflate your pageviews quite a lot, as they will try and hit back and it refreshes the page again. I used it on an adsense site and it really lowered my ctr and ecpm. It didn't lower my earnings though, just the inflated pageviews distorted my Adsense stats so I switched it back off. If you want to make your site look more popular, or are selling cpm ads, it might be worth using.

The code for anyone who wants to try it:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location)
top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>