Google rolls out 2013 Image Search design to more countries, webmasters complain of traffic loss

Recently, we’ve noticed complaints from webmasters that their image search traffic from Google has dropped significantly, specifically from countries like Germany, France and other countries outside of the US. The traffic drop is due to Google releasing the 2013 version of the Google Images design to more countries over the past couple of weeks.

When Google made the change in the United States over three-years ago, webmasters saw over a 60% drop in traffic from Google Image search. The same thing is happening now in the new countries that Google pushed out this design to recently.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that they have “recently rolled out the updated UI for Image Search to some other countries.”

Google would not tell us which countries specifically, nor would they tell us why they rolled it out over three-years after the US roll out.

What we do know is that in 2013, Google sent us this comment when responding to webamster complaints of traffic loss:

As we’ve noted before, there are no more phantom visits and actual CTR to webmaster pages, i.e. real traffic, is up 25%, so real visits are up. As you know, we doubled the way users can reach the host website.

This is an old debated topic, did your site lose traffic due to the image search change or gain? It depends on how you count that traffic.

Again, if you noticed the drop in Google Image search traffic, it is likely because of this roll out.

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