For over a year when you typed Burj Dubai into Google, three images appeared at the top of the search. One of them was of a post I wrote, and of a graphic comparing the size of buildings. It generated a good bit of traffic.
Then, suddenly, the traffic stopped. The image remains, incidentally the *very* same image, even linked to my Flickr account, but now the traffic is clearly directed to another website. What slight of hand is being used here?
When I do a search for the image on my own blog, the Google preview shows up as a broken thumbnail, despite it linking to the same Flickr image.
Here is a link to the google search that leads to the guy who appears to have stolen my place on Google. Not sure how he did it.
Here is where Google used to point to when you did the same search. As you can see the linked image is from the same source, but showing as a broken link.
Help please.
Comments
4 responses to “Something odd with Google”
Google image results have suddenly gone very wonky for everyone. Not just images though, all search results are the same. If you did a picture search for “Monica Loughman” you would get about 6 pictures of Monica from my blog in the first results page. Then suddenly all the images disapeared from all the result pages. The next day a load of irrelevent images from my blog turned up. A week later, I now see one relevent image in the results page, which appears in second place.
Most of my hits came from image results. I notice that my hit counter has stopped counting as fast as it used to so I guess its the same for all the other images on my blog also. I’m not an attention whore, but it annoys me that google are removing relevent images from their result pages, especially when it involves topics where information is hard to get.
Actually Gavin, I just realised that I can answer that one for you… The guy has linked to your image but has let you host it, google picks up on the newsest page to link to the image, even though its still your flickr account thats hosting the image. I did noticed the same thing with an image I linked to a while back to. I wrote about it here. Not sure how you can get it back… link to it again here perhaps!? Hope this is of some help! 🙂
Hmm, interesting Gamma, interesting. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.
with response to how you can get it back, just sit back and hold tight. if you have already linked to it, google will come back to you. SEs know who posted what first. however if you merely posted an image and did not link to it, then you must. if someone beat you to it, i suggest removing the image from your server, re-titling it (changing the path) and reposting it and this time linking to it. i doubt anyone will steal your spot after that 🙂 keep us posted