How do you bounce back from a loss in image search?

[DotCar]

Looking for any help in understanding what I can do to get my images back up in the images index.  My site took a hit last month which I've been working to get back up but nothing has seemed to push the needle.

Has anyone else experienced such a loss in the image index before?

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[TECHeGO]

My first recommendation would be to stop doing what you were doing last month. on a more serious note, what type of images are they? Are they all digital masters? How many images are we talking about here?

[DotCar]

Hi Seth,

It's an car niche site and we're talking about 100,000 images.  They are all still in the index, just lost their visibility.  Any experience in dealing with "lots" of image search results?  Have you seen an image query results drop like this where the results remain in the index.  Think "farmer" just images and no one else

[TECHeGO]

Part of the panda and farmer update targeted scrappers so basically Google most likely viewed those images as scrapped or of such poor quality that it pushed them deep into the index. When it comes to image optimization you need to take a look at what Google's bots can see and that is Resolution, Compression and Meta Data.

1. The higher the resolution the better
2. The quality of the compression
3. The Meta Data, I'm not talking about ALT attributes, Titles or Descriptions, I mean stuff like GPS coordinates and manually entered information about the objects in the image and the occasion on which it was captured, as well as copyright information, categories and searchable keywords.

If your images are not digital masters i.e. has not been prepared and optimized for a particular use, such as a printed magazine or use on the internet. Then they are most likely scrapped content and there is no recovering from that. Our graphic designers place copyright information and SO MUCH MORE into every image we create for clients so that if they are ever scrapped google can see the originator of the content via the meta data.

I would recommend getting a digital master image just like one of yours that is not ranking and then fill in all of the Meta Fields using a program like Adobe Photoshop and then place it on your site and see if you can get that one to rank. If so, then all 100k images are tainted if that image still wont rank then your entire site is in Google's penalty box.

I would grab an image from istockphoto to test all of this out.

[DotCar]

I'll be honest in saying I had a couple of sites affected by the panda/farmer update but saw no changes in image search so I really don't think this has anything to do with these updates.  Additionally many have said that if your query drops were not on these update days then you should be looking elsewhere.

Have you seen anything that indicates any loss around the dates shown in my original attachment?  I have a few other similar niche sites which both more and less content than the above described one which saw no changes which additionally says to me that this has nothing to do with the farmer updates.

If anyone else has noticed losses in image search I'd be very interested in sharing data.  And the same for anyone who's simply seen a loss of "image search" queries at anytime.  This is a first for me and I'd love to find someone who has been in the same boat (the image boat).