If you are a blogger you might occasionally glance at the statistics of your site. Even though most of us don’t blog just for the numbers, it’s always nice to see the number of views increasing as it means more people read about what you think is important. If you have been looking at your statistics of the past week you might have noticed a big drop in views which you might not have been able to explain. That reason is the new Google image search. Previously when people were searching for images (for example movie stills) they would see an overview of all images. When clicking on that image you would be redirected to the site which was hosting that image, which created views on your site.

The new implementation of the image search is different. If you do a search you will still see an overview of images, but when clicking on it the image immediately opens up on Google’s site, which means that there will be no visit to your blog. There are still options for the person searching to visit, but it takes an extra click. This also means less chance that they will stick around and click through to read other things you’ve written. I’ve noticed the drop in numbers and when I asked about it on Twitter, fellow bloggers also saw this happening.

You could say that less views because of “image searchers” is a good thing and I can agree with that. I personally always wished I could filter those out to get a more realistic image of actual visits, but not everyone is happy with the change as this post (thanks to Max from Impassioned Cinema for sharing it) clearly shows.

This week’s question:
Did you see a drop in the number of views your blog has been getting and what are your thoughts on it?