Forum Moderators: open
<quote> NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed, but the text on the page can still be indexed </quote>
www.altavista.com/sites/help/search/faq_web#17
Does AV seriously expect Web sites to add this meta tag to hundreds of pages?
The FAQ also says that AV respects robots.txt but the robot's name is not given. Scooter -- but why not name it?
Also, this is gone:
User-agent: vscooter # vscooter is AltaVista Image Search
Disallow: /
Does AV no longer use this robot?
<emoticon for perplexed>
The tag is generally for those concerned about copyright.
On the opposition side if copyright is so important that a company needs this on every page - their content really should be somewhere else.
I seem to recall seeing that NOIMAGEINDEX tag before, and I haven't visited the
AV "webmaster help page" in about a year, so it's not "new-new".
This, like the "robots noindex,nofollow" tag, is for webmasters who don't
have privileges to create robots.txt or use .htaccess in their root directory,
but if you do, and if you put your images in a subdirectory and Disallow that
subdirectory in robots.txt, you won't have to put that html tag on all pages.
Jim
On the opposition side if copyright is so important that a company needs this on every page - their content really should be somewhere else.
I couldn't disagree more. Placing material on the Web doesn't mean I give away rights to it. Besides, maybe I don't want AltaVista spidering my bandwidth consuming images.
You must be able to prove this in a court of law! Copyright isn't just a word that you can say "I don't give it away" you must be able to prove it .... right, otherwise it's meaningless.
In reality, most user have their cache enabled so this automatically downloads your images to their system all 10 to 50 slices.
Once there, tell me exactly how you will enforce that copyright - in essence didn't you just give it away.
Didn't you just give them permission to cache that image? Or did you?
I guess copyright is so insignificant that don't even need to prove it.
< Didn't you just give them permission to cache that image? Or did you? >
I'm willing to wager that more than 90 % of internet users don't even know what their cache is or how to clean in. In fact the first hint for the majority is when they can no longer save JPG's as JPG's because their cache is full.
I've looked at computers with years worth of temp files and other junk (cookies included) which should be cleaned out at the minimum weekly.
Most sites have a copyright notice and a terms of service that states what may be done with any copyright protected content. You skipped right over the bandwidth issue.
Thanks,
Jim :)
Bots and most visitors don't read TOS. I've taken to inserting an image in text. Which suggest reading TOS. Especially on image pages. It works somewhat. At least they read it.
And I believe this is because NOIMAGEINDEX is not a tag that is recognized by all spiders. It seems, rather, to be an invention of AltaVista.
If AV were the seach engine leader, it might be able to impose this tag on everyone, but AV is not so important anymore. I, for one, do not intend to rewrite the headers of all my HTML pages just for the sake of AV.
Thanks, Jim (jdMorgan), for reminding me that some people can't have a robots.txt. NOIMAGEINDEX, if all robots recognized it, could be useful for them.
But as to moving all my images to a subdirectory, that would involve rewriting hundreds of paths, and ... I'd almost rather block Scooter instead, for all the traffic I get from AV.
<aside> As to image indexing, the search engine filters are not very good. Who wants a picture of their grandmother as a child displayed next to a lot of French postcards. Image indexing should, therefore, be opt-in, not opt-out. AltaVista with its NOIMAGEINDEX tag is trying to make that difficult. </aside>
Does AV still allow exclusion of image indexing via robots.txt?
Oops, we did kind of wander off-topic...
I don't know if vscooter is still active, but I still have it Disallowed in my
robots.txt for some subdirectories. I don't really care if these photos get
indexed, but I doubt they'd be very interesting to anyone outside our site's
interest group - basically trying to avoid "junking up" the web... I'll keep
an eye out for vscooter, but I haven't seen it in a long time.
AV apparently created NOIMAGEINDEX as a "patch" for a hole in the robots
metatag; You can also prevent indexing of images on a page by using
"nofollow", but that means the 'bot won't follow any links to html pages on
this page, either. So, it was a "nice try," but not very workable for large
sites.
The proprietary tags can be a pain, but AV's not the only SE to "offer" them.
There's also the "nosnippet" tag from Google, and the non-optional use of
"index,follow" for Inktomi. Although, by your argument, the Google tag might
be worthwhile traffic-wise...
Jim
I have *never* seen vscooter, not once in over a year of carefully looking at my access logs. I'm glad to know that someone has -- and therefore, that it actually exists!
One other question. Scooter used to index my site about once every three weeks. But now, other than asking for the robots.txt repeatedly last month, I have not seen Scooter since May.
Have you noticed a similar change in its crawl pattern?
You must be able to prove this in a court of law! Copyright isn't just a word that you can say "I don't give it away" you must be able to prove it .... right, otherwise it's meaningless.
Copyright is a very important concept, besides the legal ramifications. The purpose behind copyright laws is to give people (you and me) an incentive to create written and artistic works. It's job is not to stop "casual copying" as many people think - the job is to make sure that if I create a work I own it and copyies of it unless I specifically give that right way.
Copyright has little to do with courts and laws and laywers and even money, especially these days with the internet and copy machines and such. Copyright is a higher intellectual concept, the concept of having respect for another's ability and the rights to what he creates.
That's my humble opinion.
Richard Lowe
Scooter crawled my public pages last month - I was surprised to see it,
actually. I don't think it's as active as it was during AVs good ole'
days, though. I was glad to see it back.
Try the "ransom note" free submit if you are not paying for inclusion on
AV. You should see their submission robot "Mercator" visit within a few
days to scout your site. Then if you're lucky, you'll get visited by
Scooter within a few months. That's what I've seen, anyway...
Jim
"... old days." Internet time needs to be measured in insect years.
Copy rights, actually, go without saying. It's the enforcing them that sucks. So why have your gallery images from - say - a photographer - spead from hell to breakfast unnecessarily? It confuses who owns the images, and how and where they may be used.
And no - I don't want to foot the bill while they're incessantly spidered, thank you very much.
I think Axl Rose said it best: "You can have anything you want - but you better not take it from me."
At least, not without asking.
