Promoting eBid

[poddster]

I have thought of a way to get the message out if this is permissible
All the pictures that I have in my listings will have a frame and in that frame I propose to have my shop name and a link to eBid
Google has a crawler that gathers images and puts them into their image folder and if you have a front page listing the image gets grabbed by Google and is displayed in Google in the shopping tab I am including a picture of what I want to do if this is against the rules, someone please let me know. the picture would go in the white space below the banner. And if this is permissible I could make some for other sellers here and that should give the site a boost.
Pod

[cornishmaid1961]

I think you will find that your items will not get onto Google Shopping if you do this. Years ago all the eBid photos used to have an eBid watermark when you created a listing and then Google went and brought in new rules. I can remember having to go through all my listings replacing my photos with plain ordinary ones which took ages !

[poddster]

Hello Becky, Bummer !!well I tried anyway. But I don't want to lose all my front page listings
I'll have to go back to the drawing boards I guess and see if I can come up with something else

Pod

[billsstamps]

I have thought of a way to get the message out if this is permissible
All the pictures that I have in my listings will have a frame and in that frame I propose to have my shop name and a link to eBid
Google has a crawler that gathers images and puts them into their image folder and if you have a front page listing the image gets grabbed by Google and is displayed in Google in the shopping tab I am including a picture of what I want to do if this is against the rules, someone please let me know. the picture would go in the white space below the banner. And if this is permissible I could make some for other sellers here and that should give the site a boost.
Pod

I wonder whether google would pick up the name of an image, for example, if you put a logic shop image, like your calling card, called TheLogicShop.jpg in every listing?

[poddster]

Yes Bill, That was the idea to embed the link as part of an image. I don't think Google scans images with any OCR type of software that would pick up a link. I will try it in a listing and see how it goes. I have made the link a bit smaller so wish me luck

Perhaps someone could tell me if there is any policy or rule of this site that is against what I propose to do.

Regards Pod

[Tanker72B1]

Yes Bill, That was the idea to embed the link as part of an image. I don't think Google scans images with any OCR type of software that would pick up a link. I will try it in a listing and see how it goes. I have made the link a bit smaller so wish me luck

Perhaps someone could tell me if there is any policy or rule of this site that is against what I propose to do.

Regards Pod

They don't, but other sites where the pictures could be posted may well check whether there are links in there, you guys should be careful about which sites allow this and which ones don't.

[heatemyfather]

They don't, but other sites where the pictures could be posted may well check whether there are links in there, you guys should be careful about which sites allow this and which ones don't.

Google will definitely do recognition of some kind on images, it's the same technology they have in their Google Photos (Apple and probably others do the same as well), it can recognise types of objects such as bicycles, cars, individual faces, etc. If they do this then I'd say it's pretty much a given that the can and probably do use OCR on images as well, even if they don't publicise the fact. This is why one should never post an image that has personal details visible in it to the public internet.

On the subject of visible links in images, I think that would surely fall foul of the same rules that bannished images with the eBid logo in the corner, they'll probably just not get added to the Google image database. Perhaps such information could be stored in the image meta data, which may or may not get stripped out (I don't think Google strip it out, eBid might though - you'd have to try it out, check an image from one of your front page listings and see if there's any meta data in the image file properties).