How do you get images to appear in Google News and Alerts
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CEO at Econsultancy
26 February 2009 11:19am
Anyone know if there is anything particular you can do to get images to appear in Google News and Google alerts for your content?
Our blog content appears on Google News but without the images that go with them.
As far as I know we just need to wait and maybe, one day, they might appear. But is there any way anyone knows of to make this happen / make it happen quicker? Does it matter, for example, that a lot of the images on our site are actually hosted on Flickr?
Obviously news and alerts with images get higher click through rates which is why we're keen to get our pretty pictures appearing!
Popular three-letter acronym at BbDeath
27 February 2009 00:43am
Hmm... I feel a little problem with the question. "blog" and "news" are a little bit in contradiction. OK-this comes from the stupid idea of web 2.0...
But OK- technically there is a slight difference between them. Beside this: do you provide "thrilling" images to all of your blog-post? Because not even bbc managed to get all their news (technically looking to be a news, not a blog-post) to be displayed with images...
So yes- your answer is completely correct (wait, and one day- when you've done everything you can) it'll happen- in a few cases.
CEO at Econsultancy
27 February 2009 16:27pm
@BbDeath - do we provide thrilling images...? Guess Google will be the judge of that, but I think our blog images are very lovely, yes ;)
And the difference between a blog and news is somewhat of a semantic debate I guess, but, given Google *is* taking our "blog" content in as "news" then I'd be surprised if it were somehow then sub-distinguishing between 'news' and 'other' and only showing images for 'news'?
Also, I see (certainly in Google alerts) some really poor imagery showing from some apparently very 'minor' sites so I'm not sure how they managed it...
Popular three-letter acronym at BbDeath
27 February 2009 17:44pm
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Feconsultancy.com%2Fblog%2F&btnG=Search+Images
And if it wouldn't have been obvious: "thrilling" means--Not high resolution enough.
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=13369&topic=11662
"Make sure that your images are fairly large in size"
I see that even smaller images appear to be indexed from the site, still this is the first to be solved IMO: at least ~150x150px, but even better if ~200x200
On the other hand at least for the blog images even the basics are missing- regarding to their hosting I cannot say anything have no experience hosting images on flickr.
But meaningful filenames, alt-text IMO would definitely help.
Popular three-letter acronym at BbDeath
27 February 2009 18:40pm
>>And if it wouldn't have been obvious: "thrilling" means--Not high resolution enough.<<
How can be sy so bad in writing...
Popular three-letter acronym at BbDeath
27 February 2009 19:09pm
This forum really puts me in shame: when I was searching for images from your blog I've forgot that they are not hosted under your domain....
But IMO others are still apply: bigger images, better describing what is on the image may help. And hosting them on your own I think would also help- at least I'd be more familiar with the situation.
CEO at Econsultancy
28 February 2009 19:49pm
Google's notes on images don't say anything about alt text or hosting on the same domain but neither could be a bad thing.
I think are images are plenty big enough. They vary in size but how much bigger a picture of a phone do you need?
I wonder actually whether it isn't the "Label your images with well-written captions", the first bullet point, that is more relevant. We don't do this, and in the cases where I've seen images pulled through (in Google News and Alerts) I think they have all had captions. I'm not quite sure how Google knows a caption is a caption? There is no mark up for a 'caption' is there?
Popular three-letter acronym at BbDeath
01 March 2009 15:45pm
Nope- obviously that mobile phone image is big enough(in fact it looks quite strange in the post itself). But I went through a couple blog posts and not that is the general size- so much not that I was convinced that all the posts have 100x75 images... what is obviously too small.
In fact the captions- hmm. yes- though have seen many news results where it doesn't applied.
would worth to give it a go in the first round:
-captions
-increasing the general image size on the post pages ( to ~200- IMO it'd even look better)
If still no luck, then play with alt text and hosting.