On a daily basis, innumerable people use Google Images to look for visual content on the internet. Be it looking for ideas for your next recipe, or visual instructions on how to fix a leaking tap, using image results can occasionally be helpful than text.

The referral source upgradation process

For webmasters, it hasn’t always been a cakewalk to understand the role of Google Images to drive site traffic. In order to address this issue, Google will launch a new referer URL specific to Google Images in the months to come. It is a part of HTTP header and signifies the last page which the user was on and clicked to go to the destination webpage.

If you develop software to specifically track or analyze website traffic, you need to be ready for such a change. Ensure that you are absorbing the new referer URL and ascribe the traffic to Google Images. New referer URL is https://images.google.com. In case you utilize Google Analytics for tracking data related to your site, the new referral URL will get automatically ingested. Traffic will be ascribed to Google Images accurately. In order to be clear, this change won’t have an impact on Search Console. Webmasters will go on receiving an aggregate list of top search queries which draw traffic to their website.

How this impacts country-specific queries?

Both new referer URL and URL used for searching on Google Images have the same country code top-level domain (ccTLD). So, most visitors across the world come from images.google.com. This is because Google made a change last year, making Google.com the default choice for searchers around the globe. But a number of users can still opt for a country specific service. Google hopes that this development will create a healthy ecosystem for visual content.

Author

Ritu from PageTraffic is a qualified Google Ads Professional and Content Head at PageTraffic. She has been the spear head for many successful Search Marketing Campaigns and currently oversees Content Marketing operations of PageTraffic in India.