Disallow Googlebot-Image but still in Froogle

[palmpal]

Hi All,

I disallow the Googlebot-Image spider because my products are graphic in nature. I noticed that links to my products now appear on Google. How is it that my site was crawled for images?

Thanks!

[mcavic]

I believe Froogle collects images via the regular Googlebot, not Googlebot-Image. Maybe you could move all your images to a separate directory and restrict all bots from there.

[palmpal]

Hi and thanks for responding. I'd like to submit a data-feed to Froogle but have some concerns. Your suggestion is something I'll think about. I guess I'm also trying to figure out why I have to "allow" googlebot-image if Froogle is not collecting images in this manner. If I remove all restrictions in my robots.txt then all my images will be spidered by Googlebot-image and they will appear on a Google image search. I'd hate to have my images appear in an image search since the images are my products!

[mcavic]

Does Froogle tell you that you need to allow Googlebot-Image in their instructions? Maybe they were planning on using it... which would make sense.

Is it really a problem to have your images listed? The pics Google indexes will be the of the same resolution that is available to the public on your site, and if someone clicks one, you'll still get a hit in your log file.

[pmac]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[sun818]

Hi, I want to ask for clarification here. Are your Froogle results from a data feed? Or the results appearing after the data feed ("extracted from web pages")?

[palmpal]

Hi,

At present my products are listed in Froogle via the web crawl and not a data feed. I was thinking about submitting a data feed but am still researching everything first. So, since my images are showing up in Froogle - how is this possible when my robots.txt denies this?

[sun818]

> web crawl

There's your answer. The other thread confirms that thumbnails in Froogle results (via data feed) do not appear if you ban Googlebot-Image.

[palmpal]

Hello,

I guess my question still remains - how could my images be listed in Froogle via the web crawl if my robots.txt disallows the Google-image bot?

[sun818]

> robots.txt disallows

Have you double-checked the syntax on your robots.txt? Here's a link on Google about it : [google.com...]

[palmpal]

Hello,

My robots.txt is correct. Also, when I do an image search on Google my images are not found. This leads me to believe that the robots.txt is working. However, for Froogle my images appear! Thanks for the feedback.

Clarification on my original post: "I noticed that links to my products now appear on Froogle."

[mcavic]

how could my images be listed in Froogle via the web crawl if my robots.txt disallows the Google-image bot?

Froogle collects images via the regular Googlebot, not Googlebot-Image, so it doesn't matter if Googlebot-Image is disallowed.

when I do an image search on Google my images are not found.

Google Images isn't very up-to-date - it probably just hasn't found your images.