Jul 13th, 2007 by admin 2,020 Views
Today I was doing some research on Google Image Search results to find ways about how to get traffic through image search queries, and I noticed a very strange thing. If you search for “Web Directory” you will get this result as output:
The first result, is a screenshot of Dmoz, Google’s Web Directory. After a closer look at the website hosting this image, I noticed that it’s name is “dmoz.jpg” and it’s ALT text is “open directory”. This is not exactly the result I would expect to see if I’m an internet user searching fo “Web Directory” on Google Image Search. It looks like Google is placing it on the first position because it considers the words “dmoz” and “web directory” the same thing. I would call this “cheating on search results”.
This result inspired me to try a little experiment. I will try to rank first in Google’s image search result pages for the words “Web Directory”. I’ve made a screenshot of the results you get if you search for this keyword in Google Images (the screenshot at the beginning of the article), and named it “dmoz.jpg”. I’ve also added “Web Directory” as ALT text. This image should now be more related to the word “Web Directory” than the imaged hosted by the website that is actually ranking on the first position for this keyword.
“Web Directory” as ALT text and “dmoz.jpg” as image name, should definetly work better than “Open Directory” as ALT text and “dmoz.jpg” as image name.
I will update this post once Google has indexed the image.
They’re cheating? Well, who runs the company? They want to promote their services, and they relate two tags that are similar. That is the way that you get good google results on the other searches, because they relate tags.
Also, if it really ticks you off that much, you can go live with the crappy, slow results from yahoo or jeeves.
This isn’t search result cheating.
If you go to the site which displays the first image (dmoz.jpg), located at http://onward.justia.com/cat-search-engine-optimization.html, you’ll notice the title “Free Web Directory […] Open Directory Project […]” above dmoz.jpg. So, google does not only return search results which match the file name, but also images near a certain text or headline containing a part of the search query. There are not much image search results which match the file name/url. Otherwise google wouldn’t find f.e. images named [some-md5-hash].jpg although such images could possibly contain f.e. a picture of a tree if you’re searching for “tree” on google’s image search.