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.