Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Tony McCreath on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/23/2013).

If you noindex a page does that stop images on that page showing up in image searches?

If you noindex a page does that stop images on that page showing up in image searches?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Gabriel Machuret: I doubt
  • Adam Cirlincione: you can no index images from the robots text file. if you want none of your images to show up in the Google index add User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
    to your file
  • Tony McCreath: If an images still shows up in image searches will they refer back to the noindexed page?

    Does an image need to be on one indexed page to show up in image searches?

    Does robots.txt actually stop images showing in image search results? I guess it stops Google accessing the actual image data so they would have nothing to show.

    I suspect the cleanest solution to excluding specific images is to use the x-robots-tag http header.

    No real reason for these questions. I just thought about it while half asleep this morning ;-)
  • Clint Henderson: No, but if you nofollow, then the image on that page won't get crawled. Noindex just means that page won't be indexed.
  • Ranu Jain: The robots.txt file asks the bots not to crawl the folders/ files.  ;But it does not forbid to index their contents if discovered some other way, i.e. through a deep link.

    You'll need an Apache server with mod_headers.c included.  ;In the root's .htaccess, you can combine a FilesMatch directive with one for the header, assuming your images are in a folder "/images":

    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    <FilesMatch "images/*.jpg$">
    Header append X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
    </FilesMatch>
    </IfModule>

    Another way could be:

    You can add a noimageindex meta tag to the header of your web page. ;

    <meta name="robots" content="noimageindex">

    But all those images on the page may still be included in the image index if they are linked to by other pages.
  • Adam Cirlincione: Let me back up my original answer with the Giant itself: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35308?hl=en

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/23/2013).