With today’s high speed Internet connections, web publishers can afford to use as many images on their sites as they want to. While making web pages attractive and attracting visitors’ attention, images help a lot in promoting the content throughout social media.
Still, judging from recent discussions webmasters should bear in mind that images should also be treated with care. What should always be taken into consideration is that images can bring your site outside the safe search Google filter even when your overall site content (including imaginary) is completely family friendly:
- Image content is harder for the machine to “understand” than text;
- When it comes to images and safe search, search engines seem to prefer to err on the conservative side;
- Once your images get into safe search filter, that effects the whole site and this label ca be very hard to remove.
So the first thing a webmaster should take care of is to ensure that he provides search engines with sufficient information on what his images are about:
- if a webmaster fails to explain a search crawl what the image is about, a search engine will have to guess;
- those guesses will not always be correct and hence will not always impact your site correctly.
How can a search engine guess?
A Google patent application covered by Bill Slawski “comes up with a method of annotation by comparison to similar images found on the Web, and the text surrounding those similar images”. Put very simply, the process of understanding the image content looks as follows:
- Google comes across an image but fails to find any text content explaining what the image is about;
- The system extracts image features (shapes, colors, and textures) from the image;
- The system then identifies other images which have similar image features;
- The system next obtains text associated with these other images, and identifies intersecting keywords in the obtained text;
- The system annotates the image with the intersecting keywords.
All in all, an image is associated with keywords found with other similar images. Thus, if you want to avoid any misunderstandings, make sure you provide enough information not to let Google guess.
How can a webmaster explain what the image is about and avoid any bad associations?
- Mind the image alternative text: an alt text should be concise and descriptive (not merely consisting of keywords);
- Stop hotlinking: someone hotlinking to your images from an adult website can get your images filtered by safe search;
- Make sure none of your image are described (with alt text, title text or surrounding text) with “bad” words (check Urban Dictionary for any keyword negative associations);
- If your site lists both adult and family-friendly images, separate them with two different subdirectories, e.g. www.site.com/adult-images/image1.jpg
www.site.com/images/image2.jpg - [never tried the method myself and also doubt it effectiveness] some webmasters report that ICRA labels are still used by search engines especially in niches that are “on the edge” (can be both adult and family-friendly).
nice to know some new infos about image building site.
I’ll take care from now to that aspect.
10q
I’m sure that adding alt to the images will give instructions to the spider about it, however as per the text, I guess that there should be a keyword density to follow, for example 15% of the images must contain the keyword and so on. Does this make sense?
In reference to the hotlinking: If you use Cpanel on your hosting, there is a setting within there to DISABLE hot linking.
Anyone out there jacking your web images will get a broken image once hot linking is disabled.
Also, it is important to note: use the ALT tag not the title tag on your images.
What does this comment has to do with this post? Nothing. You have comment with the intention of getting a backlink. This is not the idea but at least waist a bit of your time to write something at least credible and not a none sense text.
Maybe mothers to be have a bit more time but not to waist on with bad behavior or spammers. We rather prefer going to the shopping centre looking to buy some nice maternity clothing so that we can feel better about our growing belly and hips.
shme on you
Again, here I am trying to ask people not to spam this post. I cant conceive this bejaviour.
I’m a web master too and know how important is to get good back links. However I do this in a natural way. Delivering comments on posts is a good way. I love following the post content and not change it because my keyword is Maternity wear or jeans or whatever. I am not here to spam and I would like anybody would do so.
So stop acting like babies and let’s talk about images. Thanks
Is there any other way to help google understand images other than by using the “alt” tag? My images aren’t being indexed even though my blog is hosted on Blogger and I’ve been filling in the “alt” section….
@Hectopascal, your site is quite new, right? I see only 4 pages indexed in the general search. So keep up your work and give it some time…
Yes Anna, it’s kinda new. I started Crazy World of Tennis on 7 December – but I think I must be doing something wrong because google indexed my first blog quite quickly compared to how the Tennis one is going. Hopefully time makes things better…..but I’ve seen comments where some people’s blogs haven’t been indexed after 6 months :eek:
LMAO I just read the maternity clothes comment! Oh the puns killed me hahahahahn!!!