Blocking Google Image Search
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I’ve come across a few sites recently that have a line in robots.txt that blocks Google Image Search from indexing the site:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
The way I see it, Google Image search would have been blocked for one of the following reasons:
- Copyright/licensing issues: The idea that you don’t want other people using images from your site is understandable, but the reality is that you cannot stop it from happening. Disallowing Google from caching images won’t stop your images being stolen; neither will implementing fancy JavaScript to disable right clicking. Ask yourself if it matters if your images are copied? As long as they are not used on a competitor’s site, you won’t be losing any business.
- Bandwidth issues: In 2009 (soon to be 2010) we really shouldn’t need to worry too much about the amount of bandwidth Google is using caching images. You should be looking into how your site serves the images if you are encountering problems due to bandwidth. Are you serving massive megabyte images then resizing them using html? Are the images correctly optimised?
Blocking Google Image Search can potentially lose you a lot of traffic. If you use decent alt text and name the image properly, you can gain traffic from specific product searches and long tail searches. It might even be worth considering putting a watermark on images to make sure people know where they are from. There are better options than completely blocking Google Image Search.
Simon Davies
SEO Programmer
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