Here’s an interesting story on how I got a steady flow of visitors to my site from an unexpected source.

So last year sometime I was just messing around in Photoshop and drew up a few images. One of the images I made was an abstract background. On the background I just made a bunch of different circles and rounded squares with inner glows and outer glows and then I added a few squiggly strands and called it good. I posted it along with a couple of other Photoshop images on my website. Then I went into Webmaster Tools in my Google account and enabled the enhanced image search. And then I didn’t think much of it.

But then out of nowhere I started getting all these visitors to my website. I looked in my analytics to see where they were coming from and they were all coming from Google’s image search. People were searching for “abstract background” and my image was the #1 result (actually it wasn’t #1 at first, but it was on the first page and soon became #1). I don’t know how it happened exactly, but it was interesting to see visitors finding my site that way.

Now all that has come to an end. I changed domains a little bit ago and thought everything was good because I did a 301 Redirect from my old domain to my new one. People searching for “abstract background” and clicking on the link to my old domain were just being redirected to my new site and everything seemed fine. However, last week the steady flow of visitors looking for my abstract background disappeared. The redirect must not have done the trick after all and Google must have taken my image out as it realized it was on a different site because I can’t even find it in the search results anymore.

Well, it was fun while it lasted and I hope some people got to enjoy my background.

Update 1/24/09: It took a little while to get back in the search results, but now my abstract background image is back in the results. Thanks everyone for searching it out.