Reclaiming My Digital Images in Google

Building  a successful website these days  is a very difficult task, this is not 1995 anymore and promoting your products against the 5 billion or so other web-pages out there is a time consuming and often painful effort.

When I first started my website, I wanted very badly to promote my items, and one of the best ways to do this is to submit your products to auction websites such as EBay.

The nice thing about an established website such as EBay is search engines like Google already know who they are and love them. Anything posted on EBay will end up quite quickly on the first page of search engine results. I love  EBay, I have nothing bad to say, just a warning about what I found out recently with letting other websites show your images, and Google Indexing.

EBay allows a seller of a product one free picture with their posting, and unlimited self hosted images. So I like many others used my free image and then used a bunch of my own images I loading strait from my website.

The problem is that my images had not yet been indexed by Google, but once put on E-Bay, they are indexed very quickly. Google for some reason then identifies those images as belonging to E-Bay, not to your website. This means when a user does an Image search on Google for your item, and they click on your Image, they are brought to EBay’s site instead of being brought to yours.

What I would suggest, for start ups to combat this problem is to make a separate folder for images to be used online by other companies, Google can then index both your website image and the one that they feel belongs to EBay.

After taking my images off all the auction websites recently, Google now identifies that those images belong to me. I recently went from one page of image search results  on Google to approximately ten pages.

The customer traffic has increased by more than triple from image searches since I reclaimed all the images as my own.

5 Responses to Reclaiming My Digital Images in Google

  1. All of this was still not enough to reclaim all of my images.

    In addition to this, I have now blocked what is called all “Hot linking” of images to my site. That is where you can insert images directly into a page on another website. I do not necessarily want to keep it like this.

    Just so you know since I started working on this part of my website, my image traffic is now double that of the search. So it has been very worthwhile SEO.

  2. I noticed recently almost all of my image traffic disappeared, I believe this was because of either

    A) Like web pages, images when first discovered by google might get short term priority on keyword matches.

    or

    B) Recently my T-Shirt folder had grown to the size of just over 1000 images, for some reason my web host just won’t deal with a folder this size, apparently it will slow down loading times and possibly over work the server. So I have moved my shirt images into about 9 different folders now, we will see if that helps.

  3. As I mentioned above, we recently reached over 1000 images in one folder, so started to divide the one folder into 9 other folders.

    Apparently none of the FTP programs I use could handle over 1000 images in one folder, it would only show the top halve like A-M all files below that you could not scroll down to, and also didn’t work for the Skip features, so forced overwrite of any documents in that folder.

    Now that I am in 9 new folders, treed off another folder with a new name, Google has not found my image folder yet.

  4. Finally Google has found all my new image folders and is beginning to crawl through them, we realized here just how dependant our business is on Google and find it quite scary.

    I had read before how changing the design of a website was bad for SEO, and I would have to agree, don’t ever do what I did unless you absolutely had to. Unfortunately we had to do to poor site design on our part.

    Just to let you know, folder links here were indexed by Google, but the serious crawling seemed to follow a few days after I added the new image directories to my sitemap.

  5. Well this all worked out very well finally, I currently have 14 pages for my main website and about 10 pages for my image hosting website. This will probably be my last update on this post.

    Now in Google search any time you see one of our images, clicking on it will normally direct them to our website.

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