I know of a few seo professionals who voluntarily block search engines from indexing their hosted images in their site, because they believe most people who does image search in Google are scrappers and I do agree to their side of argument. But what if the case your blog’s traffic mainly depends on image search in Google?
I am sure if you are running a photo blog or blog based on wall papers or celebrity blog, most of the hits to your site would come from Google image search and I personally hold a blog on entertainment and celebrities where I get 80% of my hits from Google image search. So under these conditions I cannot afford to block search engines from indexing my images in my robots.txt, best way is to funnel through the people who does image search directly in to visiting your blog, although it might to some extent frustrate users but most people who visit your site through Google image search are mostly likely to be unique visitors because no one cares to look for the same image file over and over again.
This is where break out of frames plugin comes very handy. What this plugin does is simple, when a user clicks on an image hosted on your blog, it breaks the frame that is displayed at the top of the page in google image search and forces the user to visit your blog page directly to look at the image, this may also prove to increase your click through adsense and other ads you might have on your blog. Some people may argue that it will increase your bounce rate, but I found out from my own experience as I own a photo blog myself, my blog still has only 52% bounce rate which is not really bad.
Download: Break out of frames plugin
Tags: break out google image search frame, google image search
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I am Chakkravarthi, full time Blogger, webmaster and wordpress enthusiast . Apart from blogging I like to dwell in to SEO world most of the time.Use wordpress and support the open source community.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Those traffic will not convert to sales, subscribers, etc. People are just trying to steal images.
-Kai Lo
Twitter @lomak1985
I agree with the rest. People are just trying to steal images so you won’t get conversions. High traffic doesn’t mean they will subscribe, buy, etc.
-Kai Lo
Twitter @lomak1985
Hi Kai Lo,
Yes its a matter of fact that more people who does image search are stealers, but its inevitable that if you are running a blog or a site that depends on image search, you need to do something about it and breaking out of frames has really proved be a worthy solution for this problem, for example, you may not be able to convert your visitors in to buying something, but you can surely make some of your visitors in to clicking on an adsense ad or some other paid advertisement on your site, which can prove to convert better.
I’m not too sure about making visitors click on Adsense ads because you don’t to give a bad impression. Google doesn’t like any tricks or schemes to get people to click ads.
I don’t think its tricking people to click on ads but its just that people are interested in particular adword and wants to check a page out. You are just making them to see your ads through making the visitors to visit your blog instead of just scrapping through the image and stealing your bandwidth. I don’t think its in anyway illegal or wrong.