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Help Me, Google WAN By Erin Monda TMCnet Contributor But as we have all (undoubtedly) experienced, Google Images isn't always right on the money as far as its results go.
Sometimes bizarre and inappropriate images pop up - such as the experience we had when we searched for 'death by WAN optimization' here in our office. The result shocked and delighted our editorial team.
You probably would recognize the same familiar face -- Obi-Wan's ghost.
 So the question expectedly arose -- how had a search for 'death by WAN optimization' resulted in a picture of a Jedi shade?
To get to the bottom of it we had to ask our veteran SEO expert, Scott Bouchard, what he made of this peculiar consequence.
Here's what he had to say:
For the most part with Google images, bad results are not a matter of mis-tags (although that does happen), but rather a bi-product of a very shallow pool of content (comparable to web and news). In the case of the term 'WAN Optimization,' many people write on the subject, but few post pictures to compliment that content. Just because your image is on a page that talks about WAN Optimization, doesn't make it the best fit for an image search on WAN Optimization.
Google's algorithm does try to make relationships between content and images that weed items like this out. I'm sure that they pay attention to click through rates versus page rank as well. If the speeding bullet landed on page 1, but created 0 traffic after a period of time, it would drop in ranking substantially, being deemed 'Not appropriate' for this set of keywords.
The other part of it is the effect that the Long Tail Search has on the results. When many people put the words 'WAN' and 'death' in the same sentence, there is a very good chance they are searching about something to do with Star Wars… and not about 'WAN optimization.' If you do search just for 'WAN optimization' you do pull a decent set of image results on the subject. It's only when you start adding words and creating long tail searches that image results go horribly awry.
You may actually be the first on ever to search for 'death by WAN optimization.'
Personally, I consider it an honor. |