Disclaimer: Ok this post isn’t really about how to get ranked on Google Images (then again, it is) … it’s more about what I found out about Google Images and I thought I might share this with you cool people. 😉

I titled this post the way it is to capture your attention (i guess I succeeded … didn’t i?) but more correctly, it should have been “How Does Google Images Work” or “How Images Get Ranked on Google Images“.

Ok, in the past I’ve heard that images get on Google Images because of their “ALT” attribute of the <img> tag on the webpage that they reside but from what I’ve seen so far, that’s so not true (although that’s a minute factor).

There are many times when I search for a certain keyword but the images returned are totally unrelated to my keyword.

Here’s what I found out … images are tagged largely by the 20-50 words before and after the image (by and large, the text searched for can be anywhere on the page). Another point to that is that the words before the image are weighted slightly more (just a tad bit more) compared to the words that come after the image (you can verify that with some of the keywords I suggest at the end).

So here’s what it looks like …..

<!– 20~50 words before (Weighted slightly more) –> <image> <!–20~50 words after (Weighted slightly less) –>

Another important factor is the proximity of the keywords before and after the image. So between the 2 following cases, B would come out ahead (all things being equal)

A:

xxx xxx xxx xxx fishing bait xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx <image> xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

B:

xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx fishing bait xxx xxx <image> xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx

Needless to say … if the keyword is present before AND after the image, it gets ranked higher as well (once again, these are just my findings).

Points To Note:

  1. I’ve not seen any correlation of rankings of site with keywords searched on Google Images and the normal Google search
  2. I’ve not checked if Live Images (MSN) or Yahoo’s works the same way
  3. Age of the page is a factor from my findings (i.e Older the better)
  4. The filename of the image affects the rankings as well (try “miserable failure”)
  5. It takes quite a while for Google to index images (much slower compared to webpages)

Keywords To Try:

  1. Yahoo Groups (Warning: Some indecent pics)
  2. Warrior Tank
  3. Claim Your Copy
  4. Miserable Failure
  5. Google PageRank

Ok … enough from me for now. Time to get back to developing a new content site about Traffic Generation. Will post about it when it’s ready.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. Oh … and feel free to post a comment or two to share with the rest. =)

P.S In the next post, I’ll talk about my basic criteria whenever I choose a new domain name … Stay tuned!

P.P.S If you google about ranking on google images, there’s a whole bunch of crap and assumptions out there that I see. I’m obviously biased … but this is the most definitive guide/finding/whatever that I see on the subject.

Kelvin Chan
Kelvin Chan