I am seeing sporadic but yet recent reports from WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help with complaints about Google Image Search being spammed and taken advantage of.
The complaints come in the form of spammers taking images owned by a particular webmaster and putting them on a third party web site. Then Google picks up the stolen images and ranks the stolen image about the original owners image in Google Image Search. This has always been an issue, but maybe people are taking advantage of this more often now.
One webmaster said:
As if all the wordpress, keyword domain name generated MFA sites were not bad enough, my niche image results are now being infiltrated by the same sites having copied my images, which have been there for years, and these sites are literally only a few months old max.They've bought hundreds of keyword domain names and just stuffed single pages and incorporated AdSense, total and absolute garbage.
I suggest Google ought to get some human intervention since results like this will only lead to more advertiser dis-satisfaction.
WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, confirmed saying:
Somehow Image Search, which improved quite a bit recently, seems to have slid back now. I wonder if the hired crew of 10,000 manual reviewers ever looks at Image Search. My sense has been that they are mostly for organic text results, but what you describe does sound like it would take a human inspection to get on top of.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
