Oct 15, 2008
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There are things that you do not want the search engines to find and index. Some of these things may be your privacy policy, terms of conditions, printer friendly pages, or any other legal documents that you may have. One really good thing to not have the search engines index is your images.
Some may say that it is a good idea to have your images indexed so if people are searching for images and they find your image then maybe they will come to your site and purchase something from you. This is highly not the case.
Not many people go searching for images to buy products. They are simply looking for images for other reasons, not to buy other products.
One of the main reasons you do not want to have your images indexed is sometimes they can cause a problem. Often there are images that are corrupt and not search engine friendly. It only takes one corrupt image to have adverse affects on a search engine spider.
If a spider is crawling your pages and finds a corrupt image that is reason enough for him to leave. If he constantly finds and has trouble crawling through this corrupted image he gets very frustrated. He might not even want to come back.
There have been many websites that have been taken out of a search engine index because of corrupted images. It can be frustrating to get knocked out of the index, it can be even more frustrating when you do not know why and later figure out it was because of an image that was corrupt.
To not have the search engines index your images you simply have to put it in the robots.txt file. This file is what helps the search engine spider know what he can do and what he can’t do. To disallow a search engine from indexing your images you put:
User Agent:*
Disallow: /images
The star after user agent is meaning all search engines. If you wanted to just disallow from googlebot then it would look like this:
User Agent: googlebot
Disallow: /images
By disallowing your images from being indexed you will have one less thing to worry about giving the search engine spiders a hard time. Plus this will speed up how fast the spider can crawl your site as it does not have to pull all of your image resources.
This can increase more deep crawling of your website.