Do the Search Engines pick up vB attachment images?

Do the search engines pick up vBulletin's image attachments, if I have the thumbnails displayed?

Take this thread for example: My babies are finally home


I ask because I never see any of my images in Google Image searches, and I think it would really drive traffic to my site if my images appeared in results. We have thousands of images that have been uploaded as attachments.

Any advice or information is appreciated.

 

Well let's look at how the image code appears

HTML:

<a href="attachment.php?attachmentid=4761&d=1256752053" rel="nofollow" id="attach4761"><img class="thumbnail" src="attachment.php?attachmentid=4761&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1256752053" border="0" alt="SANY0955.jpg" /></a>

the only thing that you have working for you is the alt text.. and the original filename isn't helping you in that regard

doesn't seem like an efficient setup to get indexed

 

Perhaps I should have elaborated some more.

1 - Is it even possible to get them indexed? (I now assume it is, based on your response)

2 - If so, how/what should I optimize to improve my results? I guess the one thing you pointed out is a good starting point.
Should I change the alt text to be something like "lineolated parakeet [orig. filename]" or what?

What else (if anything) should be done?

Thanks!

 

1) I assume that it is.. unless the indexing agent looks for a file extension in the source, I really don't know if they do or not.. that's a good question actually.. another thing is that it starts as a thumbnail, so that's at least one extra hop from the actual image file

2) yes I would change the original filename, which appears to show up as the alt text, that would at least get some recognition as far as what the image contains as long as the indexing agent will accept it as a valid image.. I don't know if there's any sort of rewrite system for attachments or not.. I'm more of a fan of providing an uploader to my community than attachments, if the choice is there.. that adds in the dimension of securing your uploader against outside use, but it's not difficult by any means

 

Forgive me for posting again but this has brought up an interesting thought, in my head at least.

Often times when doing a google image result many of the first results are images hosted at photobucket, flickr, wordpress, blogspot, etc. I'd have to think that much like their site indexing that images hosted at a "known" site tend to have better rankings, therefore a better chance at showing up in the results. When you click on that image it shows the site that it was indexed from and allows you to visit it. There may be very good usage out of the plugins that allow photobucket, etc integration. You may have to deal with account deletions and bandwidth issues depending on which service that you use, but it can actually help your rankings, at least for images, I'd assume.

 

What if you replace the alt text to include the forum title or even better the thread title

 

I'm not even sure where to look to change the alt text. :shrug:

 

How To Optimize for Google Images – 10 Tips|StepForth Web Marketing Inc.

I would suggest installing this addon as well: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=203059

 

Thanks, Wayne. But how would I go about changing the alt text in attachments?