Google/Yahoo Image search

[RescueJoe]

Not too long ago I was getting well over 30,000 unique visitors to my site from the image search offered by google and yahoo. The majority of my site content is funny photos so getting visitors by the image search was a gold mine. Then I started to see lots of my bandwidth was being taken by people hotlinking my photos into their MySpace profile so I started using hotlink protection. After doing that all the visitors coming in from the image search pages by Google and Yahoo vanished. I did change the settings to allow Yahoo and Google to hotlink images yet my server logs still show no visitors coming from doing image searches.

Anyone have a similar experience? Know a good way to fix it? Something else I may be forgetting?

[carminejg3]

sorry to hear that... I noticed that one day after the big daddy update all of our images that had any pr.... dissappeared. Yet the still show up in googles image search.

as with the hotlinking.... why don't you allow people to hot link to you but request a link back to your site....

"This image was found at blahblahblah.com"

You could get some dirt cheap bandwidth these days and if you get a high amount of traffic you could use something like link adage (sells ads based on page traffic to offset the cost for the bandwidth"


besides the serps may count a link to the image as a link to you.....

[Reprobate]

"This image was found at blahblahblah.com"
That's good.

I like that.

I think simply having www.blahblahblah.com gives the impression that you own it. Or you made it.

But "This image was found at blahblahblah.com" or "This image is hosted at blahblahblah.com" is honest and also advertises your site to a lot of people.