New Googlebot and site reindexing

[timjj]

Ok, most people are aware that a new GoogleBot has been introduced. Many people have also reported their site dropped from Google in around February / March 2006, some have been reindexed and some haven't.

I'm wondering if there are any basic new rules that I have missed that has resulted in a large portion of my site not being reindexed.

I run http://www.tjphotography.co.uk and like many others I disappeared from Google for a while for no apparent reason. Top level pages have been reindexed quickly but my main problem is that all the images in my galleries have not been reindexed, and this is how most visitors found the site, by searching for images of particular things.

I am wondering if new the GoogleBot isn't indexing these pages because they lack text and are therefore not considered to be content rich. All the pages are still indexed in the by Google Image. Maybe this is what Google intends and maybe I need to add text descriptions on each image page in the gallery.

I just wanted to know if anyone can shed any light on this, or maybe spot something on my site that is preventing the new Googlebot from indexing the galleries. It is also worth noting that I have submitted a GoogleSitemap.

Having used some spider simulators I found that some could not follow links that had spaces that weren't encoded as %20. However, Google has never had a problem with this in the past and has in fact reindexed a couple of images from the gallery. I don't really want to change files names, etc. and lose my links on Google Image.

Maybe I just need to be patient! I appreciate any advice or comments that anyone can give.

Many thanks,

Tim