Last week, Google announced a new design for its Image Search. It’s been rolling out, so maybe you have it by now. One thing that was interesting about this particular launch is that Google made a major point of talking about how good it was going to be for webmasters. They even made the announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Google implied that the changes would be good for webmasters in terms of increasing traffic to their sites.
“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” said associate product manager Hongyi Li. “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.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that this will be the case for everyone, but that’s the kind of thing you want to hear, if they’re going to talk about the effects the changes have had on sites in internal testing.
Some sites, however, appear to be experiencing quite the opposite. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has been monitoring the forums as usual, and has seen webmasters complaining about “significant” decreases in traffic. He points to threads in both WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint.
It’s hard to see why the changes would have a negative effect on traffic based on the layout. As Google notes, there are now more clickable targets to get to your pages. It seems like a shuffle in rankings would be a more likley culprit.
Have you seen a dramatic difference in traffic coming from Google Image Searches for better or for worse?
On a somewhat related note, Google has been rolling out its recent SafeSearch changes to more countries, and that may be having a direct affect on some businesses. One WebProNews reader, who says they work in adult business, says the change affects their sales and research. More on all of that here.