All Google does is stealing my images...

Sigh

[Raymond]

Been trying hard to get myself some decent links. Google has never deep crawled my site. However, he invites himself every 2 to 3 days and grab all my new images.

If you like my images so much you should at least index me with a PR0!

[skipfactor]

It's a different bot and it's not stealing unless you disallow it in the robots.txt. :)

The good news is Google knows you exist, and you should expect a new visitor in the near future.

[figment88]

I think it is stealing.

Whereas regular search results index content, make snippets, and otherwise modify content, the image bot uses the material in its totality. Further, it encourages people to hotlink.

With few exceptions Google image search does not benefit the website at all, and in many cases there are very real negatives.

IMHO image search should be opt-in.

[takagi]

Whereas regular search results index content, make snippets, and otherwise modify content, the image bot uses the material in its totality.

I happen to disagree. For a page with minimal text, the snippet is the contents of the whole page. If there is more text, the SERP shows only a part of it. For a small image you see the it true size, for a bigger image, you see a shrinked version.

[Yidaki]

>IMHO image search should be opt-in.

It is - robots.txt is everybody's opt-in / opt-out option!

BTW: Google Noise is a nono here. Speaking of stealing is more than just Noise.

[mcavic]

It is - robots.txt is everybody's opt-in / opt-out option!

Correct.

[Powdork]

Doesn't noimageindex in your meta robots tag work as well?

[moltar]

What about the case when you do not have a domain? You can't use robots file.

[Powdork]

Within the head of page place this.
meta name="robots" content="noimageindex"

[kriskd]

Regarding the meta tag to prevent Google from taking images, is there one to prevent files from being taken by the various bots?

[Powdork]

noindex, follow- do not index this page but follow the links. I don't think this will stop the bot from grabbing images on the page.
index, follow- This is the default
index, nofollow- index the page, don't follow the links.
noindex, nofollow- don't index, don't follow
noarchive- don't keep a cache of the page
nosnippet- don't use the content of the page for snippets
Noindex is particularly important because if you disallow a page with robots.txt it can still be indexed based on links pointing to it. it just won't be crawled.

[Key_Master]

Meta tags have no effect on image gathering robots. Where would you stick it? ;)

So if you didn't have access to robots.txt or some sort of server side control over your files you would be powerless to prevent bots from taking your images. No opt about it. Robots.txt is not an option for everybody.

[projectphp]

Meta tags have no effect on image gathering robots. Where would you stick it? ;)

The ;) would indicate a joke, but the next few lines contadict that, (maybe it is meant to be a smmutty joke?) so I'll go ahead and answer the question anyway.

Image's are found via PAGES. So, if [domainX.com...] has the
<meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex" /> on it, NOT ONE of the images that are on that page will be indexed. That wont stop people "hard linking" to your images though, but should be a pretty good start.

As for opt in, absolutely! Pages in cache...hmmmm, that is bad, but understandable. But image search? That is outright copyright violation! That said, if you did have images that you want to protect, then some other form of protection is absolutely vital, not just to stop Google, but to stop others as well.

[Key_Master]

AFAIK, Google doesn't honor noimageindex. It's not mentioned on their website at all. Noimageindex was orginally concieved by Altavista and I believe they're the only search engine to honor it.

Even if Google did, it wouldn't matter much. There are a lot of image gathering robots on the web that don't honor noimageindex and I'm sure some of their image link databases are crawled regulary by the likes of Googlebot and others.

[John_Creed]

It is - robots.txt is everybody's opt-in / opt-out option!

False.

Why should he have to modify his Robots.txt in-order to stop Google from "stealing" his images?

But this is a rather tedious debate...

[keeper]

False.

I agree, it should be opt in. Having to alter your robots.txt to stop search engines lifting your images is opting out .....and tedious ;)

[Raymond]

Not that I want to further debate whether it is "stealing" or not, but,
I don't think it should require any web knowledge to be able to block a search engine taking images from a site. It is a basic copyright. Anyway, not that I really care. I really didn't mean "Google is stealing", main question was Google thought my images were somehow more important than my website. Not a nice feeling.