I can't see where they take images in my logs, so I don't know if it was a one-off, or how big an issue it is, but certainly some of my images/photos have been "taken" and are still displayed as a thumbnails by Yahoo Image search despite a longstanding robots.txt exclusion. If the user clicks on the images (for a better view) they show as 403 due to the fact Yahoo links to the original location and I prevent this. But my real question is whether anyone else has seen this? For a particular example search criteria, two options are returned by Yahoo and only one on Google (the other, returned by both engines, is an image unrelated to my site). So that kind of tells me that Google is playing it right (also, I've performed a few tests to prove this theory). I looked up help at Yahoo and found the link at the bottom, which tells me to contact Google to remove images from Yahoo Image search. Yet Google is correct anyway. Now I can't say I'm 'particularly bothered', although I do feature some photos that are copyrighted by their original owners so I cannot speak for them and to tell you the truth I don't know whether or not it is legal for Yahoo to copy photographs and place them on their site (I just read some interesting articles though) - and my traffic is hardly large - I just thought this a little curious, and enough so for me to raise this "anomaly" of whether Yahoo Images should be controlled by robots.txt as a question, and to see if anyone else had similar "problems".
The Yahoo help page link:
[help.yahoo.com ]
