For most bloggers, traffic and monetization is the driving force behind our blogs and motivation to blog. Therefore, why would someone who operates any image-heavy blog who would want to prevent a lot of potential traffic from Google’s image search?
There are actually a number of reasons bloggers would want to keep their pictures from being indexed by Google, a few examples being bloggers who like to post personal pictures, or custom make their pictures and don’t want others to take them.
If you feel that you fit into this category, Google has made it very easy for you to opt out of having your images indexed. Simply place the following code into your blog’s header file above the < /head > tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noimageindex">
If your site has a problem with people taking your content (including the pictures) via scrapers, etc., then there is a chance Google will still index them when they index that person’s website. Another route you can take is to place images into a folder then add a disallow to your Robots.txt file.
If you are a WordPress user, this is fairly easy as by default, as we already have pictures in either our Images folder of our theme, or the uploads folder (unless you’ve assigned a custom path for your images). You can add something like the following to your Robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
or
User-agent: *
Disallow: /uploads/
Any questions? Leave them in the comments!
