Google Images Load Site Instead Of Image?

[ProductPearson]

Hello. I have seen more and more sites doing this lately, including The Guardian website, which is accessed by millions. When Google Images added that frame thing, it killed my traffic by a huge percent. Even when people clicked on the image, it would load the image from my own site or CDN and I would gain nothing from it except used bandwidth. A lot of sites now have it so that clicking the image, clicking the "View Image" link or clicking the title will all take you to the relevant article on the website.

I have two questions related to this.

1} How do they do it? What is the script or code?

2} What are the SEO implications? Indexing issues, etc?

If you are unsure of what I mean, please type 'site:theguardian.com' into Google Images and see any of the results to replicate the issue.

[FedeEinhorn]

Care giving your site's URL?

Within your articles where your images are, do you link to the image source if the user clicks on them?

[ProductPearson]

http://searchbuzz.co

I believe Wordpress automatically does this, yes. You say I could change it so the image links to the article instead?

[FedeEinhorn]

Wordpress does it yes, but it also offers the ability to link to "nothing" meaning images within the articles won't link to the image source.

That isn't the problem, yet. Your articles' images do not link to their source.

You could use some kind of protection by using .htaccess and a php script. In any case, you should be able to determine the post to which the image belongs.

Something quick (.htaccess):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .(jpe?g|png|gif)$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(Googlebot|Googlebot-Image) [NC]
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/php_script_to_find_post_from_image.php?img=$1 [R,L]

Line 1 searches for images; line 2 checks if user comes from google; line 3 checks if it is googlebot; line 4 redirects to a page that ultimately redirects to the post that has the image.

Things to consider:

• This will probably not work having maxcdn enabled.
• This could cause issues with the latest Google penalty "Image mismatch".
• You will need to name each image matching the post, perhaps same title? or you can search all posts that have the image and then decide what to do (as a post can also have more than 1 image and can't be called the same; or an images could be used in more than one post).

Hope that helps a bit.

[ProductPearson]

Thanks for the info. As I have thousands of posts, plus the risk of being penalised I will not go ahead with this. I also love my Max CDN

Thanks for the info.

[FedeEinhorn]

I've done a little more research on this I was intrigued...

My site uses a custom blog, not a public platform, if you visit it (the blog area) it looks alike wordpress but it isn't. We also use NetDNA to serve images, which is the parent company of maxcdn.

My image search in Google returns to my posts, not the images (but there are 2 differences with your site: custom URLs on NetDNA (also possible with maxcdn) and not a Wordpress site).

Then I checked for a small blog I write about SEO, works with wordpress but without NetDNA (CloudFlare instead as the CDN) and the images in google search also link to my posts.

So that leaves with only one option, custom domains. You are serving images using a third party domain, which can be seen as a hotlink by Google and therefore they may link to the domain hosting the image, as it is probably the image owner.

This are just guesses, but it looks like a nice/possible theory.

Why don't you start using custom domains with maxcdn and see what happens?