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.

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