Google Images referral visits fell off a cliff

[JonDiPietro]

As of 28-Jan, referral traffic from Google images (/imgres) to my domain has pretty much vaporized. Visits are down 85%.

It's actually not a disaster because most of those visits were from poorly optimized alt tags that were resulting in low quality visits. The interesting thing is that visit duration is up 80% during the same period.

So I'm asking this question out of curiosity more than anything. Is this likely an algorithm tweak? I can't think of any major changes on my end.

There's only one other data point to mention but I don't see how they'd be connected. I did two PRWEB releases on 29-Jan and 30-Jan that resulted in a few hundred new no-follow links back to my site.

22b7k2.png

[khorst]

According to google , they say:

"The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on. This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website."

However, our referral traffic is down too, so is anybody else's I have seen / heard of. The number of buttons does not do anything, an I would like to see their results.

In the past, I have had good traffic from google image search, now it is just less of the same traffic, which is really sad in my opinion.

[JonDiPietro]

Yeah, I knew about the change to their presentation of images but hadn't considered the fact that it would reduce click-throughs. Even if I had considered it, I wouldn't have guessed that much of a drop-off. Thanks for the link.