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[questbg Friend questbgJoin date: May 2008Posts: 1912Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 146 Thanked: 339 times in 197 posts]

#135368

Hi Everyone

Not sure if anybody can help with this or even offer a suggestion, I’ve tried contacting Google themselves, but of course that’s harder than you would think!

Our site is often picked up by Google News service. Once we publish an article, it is generally on Google news within an hour of publication on our site (that’s the good news).

Everything has been working fine, and Google even started pulling a photograph out of the article and putting this at the side of the search results … very nice! However, a few days ago, the photographs are appearing in the search results as either ‘black’ squares, or ‘white squares’:

I tried opening the image in a new tab, and this is the URL Google gave:
http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=lk8P0ybqyd8J&imgurl=www.questbg.com/images/stories/legalandfinance/growth.jpg

Nothing appeared in the new window, but the Page Title in the browser said ‘news.gif’ 1 x 1 pixels

I then removed the Google part of the URL, leaving the link to the image on our site:
http://www.questbg.com/images/stories/legalandfinance/growth.jpg

and this works fine, the image appears as normal.

Does anybody have any idea at all why images from our site are no longer appearing in the Google news service?

Any hints, tips and suggestions would be greatly welcomed 🙂

Thanks
Chris

[scotty Friend scottyJoin date: March 2008Posts: 2339Downloads:0Uploads:13 Thanks: 76 Thanked: 827 times in 595 posts]

#279143

Do you have any type of hot-link protection on your site?

Edit: Nevermind. I just did a hot link to your image on one of my site and it displayed fine.

[scotty Friend scottyJoin date: March 2008Posts: 2339Downloads:0Uploads:13 Thanks: 76 Thanked: 827 times in 595 posts]

#279144

I presume this is you… http://groups.google.com/group/news-HelpPublishers/browse_thread/thread/780d6f05cdf07d34#. if not you may want to keep an eye on it for replies.

[questbg Friend questbgJoin date: May 2008Posts: 1912Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 146 Thanked: 339 times in 197 posts]

#279145

Thanks Scotty. It was a fine initial thought though, we do sometimes use a ‘no follow’ robots tag if we’ve got an article with plenty of links to external sources, but the ones with the problem issues haven’t.

Strange though, this problem only happened in the last week or so, before that the images were displaying fine.

We’ve not changed everything, our images are always a standard resolution, size and format.

Maybe just Google doing their own thing as usual 😀

Cheers
Chris

[questbg Friend questbgJoin date: May 2008Posts: 1912Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 146 Thanked: 339 times in 197 posts]

#279146

<em>@scotty 90750 wrote:</em><blockquote>I presume this is you…
</blockquote>

Yes indeed that’s us … thought it may be worth a shot!

Thanks
Chris

[scotty Friend scottyJoin date: March 2008Posts: 2339Downloads:0Uploads:13 Thanks: 76 Thanked: 827 times in 595 posts]

#279148

The URL that displays your image on the google page is…
http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=lk8P0ybqyd8J

In the code it includes the URL of the original image (http://www.questbg.com/images/stories/legalandfinance/growth.jpg) but google is not calling it from there for their page. In other words they have made their own copy of the image and this is what they are displaying.

Your original image is a jpg but the image they are linking to (their own copy) is a gif. All working images on google news are jpg’s.

This would indicate to me that the fault is 100% at googles end and there is nothing you can do to fix it except let google know about the problem.

1 user says Thank You to scotty for this useful post

1. questbg

[questbg Friend questbgJoin date: May 2008Posts: 1912Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 146 Thanked: 339 times in 197 posts]

#279150

Thanks Scotty. I never realised they had copied the image … I assumed they were loading it from our own server! Surely that’s a breach of copyright!

😀

I’ll post this info on into the thread on the Google groups forum and hope somebody (maybe even Google themselves) know what’s happening!

Thanks again
Chris

[scotty Friend scottyJoin date: March 2008Posts: 2339Downloads:0Uploads:13 Thanks: 76 Thanked: 827 times in 595 posts]

#279151

Your welcome! hope you get it sorted soon.

questbg;90758Surely that’s a breach of copyright!

You could say the same about any text from your site being displayed in search engine results.

As they are displaying the pic to promote your article and not passing it off as their own work then I would say it is not a breach of copyright. But interesting topic.

[questbg Friend questbgJoin date: May 2008Posts: 1912Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 146 Thanked: 339 times in 197 posts]

#279154

Hi Scotty

<em>@scotty 90760 wrote:</em><blockquote>As they are displaying the pic to promote your article and not passing it off as their own work then I would say it is not a breach of copyright. But interesting topic.</blockquote>

Quite. I’m sure it was somewhere in the Terms & Conditions when I applied to be featured on Google News in the first place!!

🙂

Now, if only I could find a tech-support e-mail addy. It seems all ‘contact’ information is really difficult to find on the google.com site. Half an hour already without a sniff of an e-mail address.

Thanks again for your help Scotty, much appreciated and valuable feedback.

Cheers
Chris

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