Google: Photos and SEO

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. March 2011 - 11:25

If you want to sell any photo on the web, you have only 2 choices:

  1. Microstock like iStockPhoto and the others
  2. Your own website

The problem with using your own website is that people have to find you. Google, here we come. You are indexed by Google and nothing! No inquiry, no sale, nothing, nada… What's happening?

What's the problem?

Google has the standard Googlebot. That's the standard index spider. That's the one that everybody looks for. That's the spider that grabs the web pages from your website and place them in a temporary area until Google decide to place your web pages in their index.

Google doesn't index websites. Google only index web pages!

Googlebot doesn't retrieve photos, images, videos,…

Google has 5 separate and distinct web spiders.

  1. Googlebot: The one we all know.
  2. Googlebot — Mobile: This spider is dedicated to smart phones, tablets…
  3. Googlebot — Images: This spider only retrieves the images, photos, videos…
  4. MediaPartners: This spiders crawls your website to decide which ads to place on your website if you sign up for GoogleAds.
  5. AdBot — Google: To measure the quality of the AdWords landing pages.

Here we deal with photos. So how do we get Googlebot — Images to come?

  1. By being indexed by the standard Googlebot.
  2. By being placed in the main Google index.
  3. By doing your work to tell Google that you have a photo that they should index and what is the photo about.

Google requirements

  1. Google doesn't understand much about photos.
  2. Google doesn't understand RAW. Mostly JPEG, some PNG…

  3. The photo must look good at around 120 pixels square or rectangular as a thumbnail. This means:

    • The photo should be a simple photo, something like a close up against some neutral background.
    • The photo should have no watermark. Google has decided that watermark interfere with the “user experience” of the photo. The photo with the watermark will make the thumbnail “impossible” to view.
    • The photo should be at least 350 pixels on the long side.

  4. Google does read the EXIF copyright, the EXIF description, and the EXIF caption.

  5. I haven't figured out why, but sometimes Google doesn't always read the IPTC keywords properly.
  6. The filename should be appropriate. IMG_2762.jpg is useless. Now REIFEL-20110311-2762.JPG is slightly better if the photo is taken at Reifel. The photo being of ducks: REIFEL-DUCKS-20110311-2762.jpg is already much better. And finally, REIFEL-DUCKS-MALLARDS-20110311-2762.jpg is the best. The photo is about Reifel, ducks, and specifically mallards.
  7. You should have the text near the photo to explain that the photo was done at Reifel and is about ducks. The ducks are mallards, aka: “Anas Platyrhynchos”. The text shouldn't be just on the same page. The text must be next to the photo.

Now all of these steps will allow Google to tie together the web page, the index, and the photo. Then and only then, you can cross your fingers.