Google image problem.

sniperhiga · 06-20-2008, 03:58 PM

My client used to have his website in HTML and many visitors was comming from Google Image search.
About 6 month ago he switched to Joomla (php) and all his photos dissapeared from Google Images. What the problem?

C.Whyte · 06-20-2008, 04:34 PM

Are you positive it had to do with the switch? Could have just been an image update through google. I got quite a few pictures de-ranked before.

sniperhiga · 06-20-2008, 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by C.Whyte

Are you positive it had to do with the switch? Could have just been an image update through google. I got quite a few pictures de-ranked before.

It happened right after switch.

**StarLab** · 06-20-2008, 05:13 PM

By any chance did he put the photos off the /image directory?

The default robots.txt file that ships with Joomla Disallows the /image directory. I would suspect this is why the images disappeared from Google.

sniperhiga · 06-20-2008, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by StarLab

By any chance did he put the photos off the /image directory?

The default robots.txt file that ships with Joomla Disallows the /image directory. I would suspect this is why the images disappeared from Google.

Good advice. We gonna investigate!

kceleb9 · 06-22-2008, 09:35 AM

Are images put into code on server or called from the client?

sniperhiga · 06-22-2008, 09:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kceleb9

Are images put into code on server or called from the client?

I need to check. Can you please take a look ( VideoBabylon dot ca (Canada))

kceleb9 · 06-22-2008, 10:34 PM

i will check it out and see what i can tell... thanks.

Quote:

Originally Posted by sniperhiga

I need to check. Can you please take a look ( VideoBabylon dot ca (Canada))

**StarLab** · 06-23-2008, 07:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sniperhiga

I need to check. Can you please take a look ( VideoBabylon dot ca (Canada))

I'm guessing that the Gallery contains the images which have disappeared from Google, right?

I see the site uses a Flash Slideshow to display the images. Right there is likely the problem. GoogleBot likely doesn't see the images imbedded within (or called from) Flash. His old site likely had HTML pages with clickable thumbnails, which Google can follow fine. Once the site started using the Flash slideshow, the images could no longer be crawled by GoogleBot, therefor, disappearing from Google's Image index.

Quote:

Flash and Silverlight (like other rich media formats) are inherently visual, which can cause some problems for Googlebot. Unlike some Internet spiders, Googlebot can read some rich media files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing.

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=72746

sniperhiga · 06-29-2008, 06:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by StarLab

I'm guessing that the Gallery contains the images which have disappeared from Google, right?

I see the site uses a Flash Slideshow to display the images. Right there is likely the problem. GoogleBot likely doesn't see the images imbedded within (or called from) Flash. His old site likely had HTML pages with clickable thumbnails, which Google can follow fine. Once the site started using the Flash slideshow, the images could no longer be crawled by GoogleBot, therefor, disappearing from Google's Image index.

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=72746

Thank you, but he still have a lot of pictures in his content. I don't think it should be a problem for Google t o see them.

zeruel · 06-23-2008, 05:25 AM

Well I think it is a good thing that the images disappeared in the Google image results, meaning, there's no traffic coming from Google Images. I believe traffic coming from it won't do you any good in terms of conversion...

x3mario · 06-24-2008, 01:14 AM

I'm also thinking that the directory of his photos was not included in the code when he switched his site.

morph07 · 06-30-2008, 06:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sniperhiga

My client used to have his website in HTML and many visitors was comming from Google Image search.
About 6 month ago he switched to Joomla (php) and all his photos dissapeared from Google Images. What the problem?

Its very simple... the URLs of the image where its located is change...

How about the content along with the image, does it change also?

webzenstar · 07-03-2008, 08:34 AM

If you change the URLs for content items in your web site, because you switch to Joomla or for any other reason, you can attempt to write up a "redirection rule" in a .htaccess file, if you're hosted on Apache.

This will greatly increase your chances of having the search engine spiders find the content they're looking for.

robpongi · 07-04-2008, 03:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sniperhiga

My client used to have his website in HTML and many visitors was comming from Google Image search.
About 6 month ago he switched to Joomla (php) and all his photos dissapeared from Google Images. What the problem?

Hi Sniperhiga,

Well, I have briefly wrote about this here before:

Google's Equation Thread

Quote:

Also, IMHO, a big part of it all is coding your pages to be VALID html and/or VALID xhtml according to the current W3C standards. Even though this isn't an "official" guideline, I really think it makes a big difference as, for one thing, it increases page trust. PHP pages? No way! GO BACK TO HTML OR XHTML because there are so many spam servers out there dumping duplicate content PHP all over the web and if your site is PHP, often the big search engines cannot tell the difference between spam and the original pages. This is, of course, just my humble opinion.

And I should add that my main site is now %100 VALID HTML 4.01 Transitional. And all but one of my 351 pages have been indexed by Google. And ALL the 200+ pictures from my site's photo gallery are indexed. VALID HTML or XHTML - its the way to go for sure.

Good luck.

Rob