Yahoo Image Search Problem!

[Joe_Wood]

When you click almost all of my Yahoo Image Search images, you get taken to a Image Directory instead of my website, and there's no way the searcher can get to my site from the Directory. My images are usually on the first page too, for almost all of my keywords, so I must be loosing a huge amount of traffic over this.

For example, when you search for Japanese Garden Gates
http://tinyurl.com/293kb8 you see three of my woodsshop.com CAD images on the first page, but when you click them you go to a Directory and not my website.

sometimes the images in Y Image Search do take you to my site, maybe one in 20. In Google, I think only one in a 100 take you to the directory, all the rest go to my site, so my issue is mainly with the Y Image Search.

Might this be a clue? I did a search for "japanese gate plan"
http://tinyurl.com/24ad79

The first 4 of my images on the top line take you to the directory, but the 5th one ( japanese_gate.jpg ) takes you to my site. We need to figure out why that 5th one works and the others don't.

Also #s 6 (Japanese_Gate_P...00.jpg) and #8 (GatePlan.jpg) take you to my site.

I've optimized my site so well for image searches, but I'm getting almost no traffic from Yahoo Image Search, hope someone can help me with this so my site can get found!

Here's what my webmaster posted on another Forum ..

"When I do an image search through yahoo. I some times get the lower
frame to be a 'Index of /images' Directory.
How can I prevent that as I would like just the web-page the image is
on in the lower frame and not exposing my entire directory."

[ultimatehandyman]

Sorry I can't help, but that is weird.

You can't even click on the links underneath the pictures

[Peter77]

Hmm, seems you don't have a simple index.html page to block people/bots from entering your Image directory.

I'm pretty sure you would also have to Disallow robots from entering/spidering your image directory... because really, for as long as you don't have a hot-link prevention to your images, search engines should be scanning those pictures on content of your site and not strait from the image directory.

[Joe_Wood]

Peter! You're the first one with some good info! Really appreciate the feedback.

here's what my webmaster says to your post ..

"An answer, but not really a solution. I had to take a look at your images folder and I don't see an index.htm page.

So if you were to place one there.. what would it say? Sorry the image your interested in is directing you to this page and not the page it's found on.

I could place a meta tag in there that says robots="no-follow, no-index" as would that force the robots to properly index the page? I don't know."

[Peter77]

Hey it's no problem.

The index.html file you have to create yourself via control panel or FTP and it doesn't have to have anything in it.

If you want, maybe very simple HTML;

[SeO]

The idea in general is to use a blank index.html, so that users and bots will see it (eg a blanck page) rather than the image list.
It's a cheap way to deactivate the Apache indexes option. index.html gets displayed when the directory asked for (example.com/ vs example.com/index.html), because it is present by default in the Apache DirectoryIndex list.

If you want to make sure file listing can never be used, add :

[Joe_Wood]

You two have given my webmaster alot to work with, can't say how much I appreciate this!

I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks so much guys!

[SeO]

You're welcome

[Joe_Wood]

Someone on another forum probably just solved the mystery for me!

Those are all images that I deleted from the page, but never removed from my website. I just noticed that myself in the last few days, that most of those dead link images were old images I had removed, but I never put two and two together.

I've been editing and adding to my website for years now, and when I started I didn't know much about computers, and only recently have I started looking for and removing images that I had deleted from the page.

I guess I need to find and delete all those images now. Oh man, that will be alot of work! I might have a hundred, or probably more!

Is there by any chance, software that would look for and delete all these images for me? (fingers crossed)

[Joe_Wood]

OK, I've been looking at all those images (and deleting some), and not all of them are images that I took off the page but never deleted. Some are still on the web page.

[Joe_Wood]

OK, I'm one happy kid now! We put the Index.html in there, and now people can actually get to my site!

Click on the second image to see it.
http://tinyurl.com/2nhak5

Can't say how much I appreciate the advice folks. Thanks again!

[SeO]

maintenance is some great work on the long run.

For the future, you should still disallow the image dir in your robots.txt to make sure it won't happen again.

Anyway, happy you solved the issue

[Joe_Wood]

Say I do put in that disallow robots text. Any idea how long those images will still be showing up in Yahoo Image Search? Remember, almost all the yahoo Image Search results I'm getting now are from images I've removed from my site a few years ago, but not removed from my Image Folder.

[SeO]

Yahoo can be very long to take robots.txt into account, but it eventually will.

It's just better to provide bots with proper info about what to crawl, it's at least giving them a chance to fulfill your wishes