Images blocked as 'unsafe' after joing dreamhost?

#1

Hi all,

I recently moved my websites to dreamhost and from about 5 days after the move, I noticed traffic to my sites collapsed by about 80%. This has stayed the same to date. A lot of my traffic comes from search results in the ‘Google Image Search’ - but I have discovered that nearly every image on my site has now been blocked by the ‘safe search’ option. Turning the option off shows all the images up again. The images are of course all safe for all ages - mostly photos of cars.

I’ve not made any other changes to the site in that time frame, the change of hosting is the only thing I know of that could have triggered this.

I have tried using a website called a ‘Reverse IP DNS Domain Check Tool’ which promises to list all the domain names on the same IP address, because I thought I might be sharing an IP address with a porn site or similar, causing Google to block me too. But this shows only a small number of sites sharing my IP address, all respectable looking businesses or simple holding pages.

Does anyone have ideas what I could do?

Thanks

#2

What is the URL of your site?

Simon’s website
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#3

If you’re concerned that another site that’s hosted on your server could be the problem, then ask support to transfer you to a different server.

emufarmers.com
Very little to do with either emus or farmers!

#4

http://www.google.com/safesearch_help.html

You could submit a complaint/question, and see what happens.

Edit: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/refresh-of-images-and-groups/

They recently changed image search; could be a coincidence.

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#5

Could be; but it was a couple of weeks after the layout change, and only a couple of days after the server move.

#6

I forgot to say; I have submitted a question, but there has been no reply or change yet.

#7

Well I don’t have any reason to think that is the case, but if nothing else solves it then I may try that. I have no way of knowing what Google believes the problem is, it may have smacked me based on the entire netblock even.

Having said that, not every image is marked unsafe. But most of the higher traffic images are.

#8

http://thedruid.co.uk

check the difference between:
http://images.google.com/images?q=site:thedruid.co.uk&safe=active
and
http://images.google.com/images?q=site:thedruid.co.uk&safe=off

#9

[quote]I have no way of knowing what Google believes the problem is,

[/quote]

It could be a way of encouraging you to signup for webmaster tools to get more information.

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8465
https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34591&topic=8465

If you were on the watch for “unsafe” sites, like google, wouldn’t you have a flag for sites that moved? It could be your move triggered a check, and the check evaluated your images differently than the last time.

I noticed a difference between zoo and barnyard animals. :smiley: Concerts also look dangerous.

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#10