Thread

I’ve gotten no response on the Google webmaster forums, but maybe somebody here knows.

Google image search insists on picking up images from other sites that members embed in comments. We don’t want to block users from inlining images, but we also don’t want to be showing up as the source for that image in Google Image Search.

We have

User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

in robots.txt, which works to block Google Image Search from any images hosted on our site. But it does nothing for linked images.

There doesn’t appear to be any image equivalent of ‘rel=“nofollow”’ for images.

Any thoughts?

bump

in robots.txt, which works to block Google Image Search from any images hosted on our site. But it does nothing for linked images.

Is the problem that Google finds those linked images and displays them anyway?

Have you tried using .htaccess to prevent image hijacking?

in robots.txt, which works to block Google Image Search from any images hosted on our site. But it does nothing for linked images.

Is the problem that Google finds those linked images and displays them anyway?

Have you tried using .htaccess to prevent image hijacking?

The problem isn’t with images that we host and serve. robots.txt deals with those.

The problem is that when our users inline images from other sites in their comments, Google image search spiders them, but reports them as if they originate from our site.

We don’t want to turn off images in comments, but we don’t want Google image search reporting them either. We want a behavior like ‘rel=“nofollow”’ for img tags, so that Google image search will ignore them.