: Does Google penalize websites only in Google Image search? I re-built a Flash website into an AJAX-based website, which generates all its content from JSON data using AJAX. It's a photography

@Nimeshi995

First, are you aware that your website's robots.txt has the following in it?

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /


This will prevent all images from being indexed in Google's Image Search. See this for more on that: prevent images from appearing in Image Search.

Secondly, although Google can crawl some AJAX, it depends on how it's presented. I would suggest reviewing these Google Webmasters Tools help documents:


Getting started with AJAX
AJAX crawling: guide for webmasters and developers
AJAX: Frequently Asked Questions

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@Bryan171

Your first question, "Does Google penalize websites in Google Images" doesn't make much sense. Google ranks sites for different use cases (e.g. image similarity vs. query string context likelihood). Googlebot can execute JavaScript for exactly this reason, so that it can crawl and index AJAX-driven websites, so you don't need to do a static version, although for accessibility reasons you should try to do so, and it sounds like you already have so please keep it. Make sure you serve the same content to Googlebot that you serve to other UAs, static or otherwise.

Did you move the images (change their URLs) when you removed Flash, and are returning 404s for the old URLs? That would cause them to fall out of the results. Google Webmaster Tools has a facility for reactivating a de-listed site, if that is what has happened to you. It will say if you have violated some terms there. Google will not tell you what parameters it is using to determine the rank of your images in it's algorithm, however, including penalties.

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