Should I block Google Images search?
Lately, and especially since I launched the photos section of this site, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Google Images search. At first I thought it kind of neat that people were searching for images, or photos, and ending up finding my site in the results. But then once the traffic began to spike I began to wonder if I should allow Google Images search to index my photos and images at all.
I don’t have to pay for hosting at this site (the fine folks at Sonnex Hosting do that for me, and I appreciate it very much) - but that doesn’t mean I’m not mindful of the amount of bandwidth I am sucking up. But this isn’t the only reason I’d like to dump Google Images search.
Many of these “hits” are due to my site loading in the Google Images search “frame set” which loads a thumbnail preview of the image you clicked along with the page that the image appears on. Essentially, it is an empty hit. This traffic has very little value to me.
On one hand you might think I could turn on Google Adsense on this site to hopefully make a few dollars from this traffic. Perhaps I could even go one step further and turn on Google Adsense for only those visiting from Google Images search. After thinking about that though, I don’t think they’d ever see them - let alone click on them - since my site is loading in a frame.
So far this isn’t such a big problem that I need to do something quickly or rash. But I would really like some feedback if anyone has dealt with this in the past.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:19 am
I don’t see how the visitors loading the page in a frame affects anything.
The google images header is tiny, around maybe a 15th of the height of the page on my screen…
If visits from search engines just come here, get what they need, and leave… it doesn’t matter if what they need is an image or a snippet of text or a solution to a problem. If what they’re here for is NOT a new feed to subscribe for, then search hits could *all* be classified as useless and worth blocking (the engines, that is, not the referred linkers).
If you’re using lighttpd, here’s a wonderful snippet that may help:
# Deny all bots$HTTP["useragent"] =~ “([bB][oO][tT]|[cC][rR][aA][wW][lL]|[Ss][Pp][IiYy][Dd][Ee][Rr]|Google|Slurp|msn|Scooter|Mercator)” {
url.access-deny = ( “” )
}
December 5th, 2007 at 3:16 am
I think it’d be cool if you were able to detect if the referral was from google images, and then if it was, throw up a javascript that covers the entire browser window and welcomes them to your website and links to the front page of your photo section.
That way people who are interested enough to click through actually look at your images, but people who are just trying to steal the image get lost and leave.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Hey thanks for stopping by my site. I’ll be messing with Viddler soon! Be on the look out!
December 5th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Elliot: I suppose by “worthless” I meant that I couldn’t derive any value from the hit. I’m not only speaking of subscriptions to my feed - I’m talking about engaging in conversation, clicking an ad for revenue, etc. Not everyone that comes to my site subscribes, and I’m fine with that - but I do like when people participate at some level. Like you! Thanks.
Daniel: Good suggestion, only that’d still be loading a file from my host. I’m thinking that if I were to decide to block Google Images - I’d block it altogether.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:50 am
[...] those coming from search engines do not take part in the conversation. We’ve talked about the traffic I get from Google Images and I wanted to somehow get some sort of return on that traffic. Again, I have no idea if this will [...]