How do you stop hotlinked images from being indexed

[speedshopping]

Hi,

We have product feeds from multiple sources, and we display the image that they supply on our pages.

The problem is that Google is indexing these images in their images search engine, and attributing these images to us.

We have a robots.txt file to tell Googlebot-Image not to index images, but because we hotlink the images using the URL the feed supplies, it seems to be ignoring the rule.

Is there any way we can prevent these images from being indexed as part of our site? (unfortunately we can't host the images on our own server, we have to use the URL the feed gives us)

Cheers,
Wesiwyg

[rainborick]

You can't block images that don't reside in your own domain. But instead of using the direct URL from the outside sources in your <img> tags, you could instead use an intermediate script on your site to fetch the remote images for display and then block that script in your robots.txt file.