16 November 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Google Image Sitemaps cometh from PubCon

Back in 2007, there was a feature to submit image Sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. Bigmouthmedia believes that some users were able to take advantage of this feature before Google removed it, but many webmasters have long questioned whether Google would ever allow webmasters to tag and submit image Sitemaps.

During the PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Google announced the launch of a new Image Sitemap schema, which will allow users to tag images with Meta data. The news quickly spread via popular microblogging website Twitter.

Example Image Sitemap Schema

Google Image Sitemaps cometh from PubCon

Google Image Sitemaps cometh from PubCon

As detailed previously, Image Sitemaps allow users to noticeably assign Meta data to images, for data such as geo location, artist, category, language, family friendliness, etc.

It seems fairly obvious that Google could use image Sitemaps to improve its Image Search, and may cause the company to introduce new Search Options facets such as:

License
Date
Category
Explicit Size
Artist

Additionally, with the ability to add Meta data to each image, Google could use this data to populate Google Image Search with images from other properties, such as Panaramio, Picasa and Google Maps & Local. This could be especially useful for the travel industry.

Overall, bigmouthmedia is excited and awaiting the release of Image Sitemaps to the general public - assuming it makes it that far. Image search is a strong feature of universal search, providing users with a diverse set of search results. Next time you use Google's Search Option "images from this page," you may wish to ask yourself if Google has taken the image from the website's Image Sitemap.