Andem - 10:44 pm on Jan 29, 2013 (gmt 0)

There was an article in Germany today regarding the new Google images layout, more specifically questioning the legality of the new design that Google will most likely introduce to Germany.

[spiegel.de...] [German]

Here's what happened to me in the summer: I got fed up with Google's (then) changing policy on showing images in a shadowbox-like frame but disabling javascript on the original site. For around 200 high-res images, I completely banned all access to any image requests from Mountain View and they eventually disappeared from the index. Bounce rates AND load averages dropped.

More recently, I started showing 403 responses to Google for all image attachments and galleries on my forums and load average dropped even more. Site speed has increased nicely and I couldn't be happier for it.

I plan to slowly start this process with thousands of other images we have uploaded over the years on a couple of different sites.

Once this catches on, the relevancy of Google Image Search will have decreased significantly. In a few years, with the image scrapers and hotlinkers no longer able to find images to steal, Image Search may well be a thing of the past.