Google Starts to Index Images Uploaded to Blogger
Even if this sounds hard to believe, Google Image Search started to index images uploaded to Blogger in December 2007. Until this month, all the images were prevented from being indexed by search engines for unknown reasons.
Context & Ripple Effects
The change lands at the end of a year in which Google steadily invested in its blogging property: in March 2007 the same outlet dissected how Google Blog Search ranks results, and in August Google's Blogger team fixed bugs and added video uploading. Making Blogger images visible to Google Image Search completes that pattern of pulling the platform into the company's own discovery surfaces.
What changed this month is a default, not a feature: until December 2007 every image uploaded to Blogger was blocked from search engine indexing, for reasons Google never explained. With that block lifted, millions of already-published blog photos effectively become newly searchable content overnight.
First-order effects
- Blogger publishers gain a new discovery channel without doing any work — their existing image libraries can now surface in Google Image Search results and send referral traffic to posts.
- Google Image Search's index absorbs a large corpus of user-generated photos that was previously invisible to it, expanding coverage precisely in the long-tail, personal-photo segment general web crawls underrepresent.
Second-order effects
- Rival hosted blogging platforms now compete against a Google property whose images get preferential plumbing into Google Image Search, sharpening the question of whether other hosts' media get equivalent treatment.
- For Blogger itself, incoming image-search traffic raises the value of the free platform as an acquisition funnel, since photo-heavy blogs have a fresh reason to stay on Google's host rather than move elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- The episode shows how much power sits in platform defaults: one unannounced switch converted a whole class of content from unindexed to indexed, foreshadowing search visibility becoming a lever platforms control over their users' material.
- If Google keeps folding content from its own hosted services into its indexes, the line between 'the open web' and 'Google's properties' blurs for ranking purposes — a structural advantage competitors in both search and blogging have to answer.
The trend: Google is progressively integrating user-generated content on its own hosted platforms into its core search products, making indexing defaults a strategic control point between platforms and publishers.