Are Google Image Hits Worth Anything To Your Site?
February 13th, 2008 by
Mark
There will be very few webmasters who have not come across the massive picture library which is Google Images, but what does it really do? Is there a purpose to it?
While there is no doubt that the Google Images service (which trawls the web for images and indexes thumb nail links to the sites in question) is very popular, there are some concerns about the basis for the service. There are a number of issues which include :-
Copyright
There has been a movement over the last few months to tighten up on the use of copyright protected images, millions of which actually appear on Google Images. Too many people are under the impression that because the image is listed on Google Images that it is free to use. This is not the case with the majority of images, with many webmasters running the risk of fines for illegal use.
Traffic
If you have images on your website then there is every chance that at some point you will have received a variety of hits from Google Images (these show up under a different URL to the regular Google search engine). Many site owners are reporting enormous hits via this route, but what are they actually worth to you?
Just because you are looking for a picture of the latest sports car does not mean that you are looking to buy one! The vast majority of Google Image users will be looking for an interesting picture or something which they can use on their website – the chances of them looking for the services you are offering are very slim to say the least.Â
Conclusion
In summary, while many people may not agree, the use of Google Images is very limited indeed and while it is easy to attract traffic via this route it is a little different when it comes to turning this into cold hard cash. So next time you are looking to buy a website and see massive traffic, just check out how much is coming from Google Images as this can give something of a misleading impression to those who do not ask the question.
| 2.5 |
Free hit counters from FreeCounterPro.com
AboutUs.org - Advertising worth the money?
How to improve AboutUs.org
Microsoft Virtual Earth is here!
Ask Amanda at your Google page
TylerCruz.com
February 15th, 2008 at 3:37 am
No doubt by displaying some of the Google images may attract some or more 'misleading' traffic but I guess this is one of the best ways to improve our ranking, pr, click and so on. I guess so long there is no action being taken from Google, most of us would continue to do so.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:29 am
I'm one of those people who believes that all traffic is good traffic. I feel like it is up to the blogger to gain the attention of people who come to their blog.
I use a lot of images, but not many of them are from the Google image index, so that particular traffic is not a significant portion of my traffic.
I do think that you are right about the copyright factor though. At some point the owners of these photos may begin to pull them off.
Another insightful post!
February 15th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Some guy out there has linked to one of my t-shirt images and has been using it as his avatar in his forum posts. At first I thought, "what a jerk", then I realized what a great thing it did for my rank! So I guess there's good and bad.
February 15th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Be very careful with people using your images as I had someone link to my images for their eBay auctions. As they were linking to my site each time the auctions were viewed, it used up masses of my bandwidth.
This is a big downside.