Importance of Images to Search Engines

We have been doing some analysis to see which major search engine crawlers or bots harvest the most images from our customers websites. We have focused on Google's Googlebot, Yahoo's Slurp and Bing's Bingbot.

Anybody involved with search engine optimisation knows that Google has a ferocious appetite for content. What surprised us is how aggressive Yahoo Slurp is in harvesting images from websites. The following graph shows by week the number of images the search engines have downloaded.

The major search engines obviously believe that image search is very important as they are investing heavily in crawling for images. Some of our customers are experiencing 20,000 image downloads a day from individual image crawlers / bots.

If you haven't already you should consider investing in image sitemaps.

For more information about search engine optimising images read this article on Search Engine Optimising Images.