Noindex tag and images

[aristotle]

On 12-06-2016 I added a noindex metatag to a page that has about 10 images and then did a fetch as googlebot in Search Console. It took about a week for google.com to completely remove the page from its results.

The image impressions in google.com image search also fell, but more slowly. I expected them to be gone by now, but they are still appearing, and in fact seem to be increasing the past few days.

[Aside: Bing is also still showing the images in its image results]

So my question is, why is google still showing my images in its image search more than 6 weeks after I no-indexed the page, and with the number of impressions no longer falling but even beginning to increase?

[Dimitri]

Hi,

I am not a specialist, may be the "noindex" refers to the "text" content of a page, and not images. An image, which is an external file, might not be considered as part of the page. (may be images are handled by the "nofollow" tag, I don't know).

Also, it's possible your images are indexed because other sites are displaying / linking to them.

The best way to get images removed from Google image search, is to use the robots.txt file (if these images and only them are in a particular folder), or simply add the "X-Robots-Tag: noindex" header to these images. (I mean the header returned by the server, of course).

[aristotle]

Dimitri - Thanks for your reply. Yes I know that you can use robots.txt and X-Robots-Tag: noindex header, but didn't think additional measures like those would be necessary.

[NickMNS]

@aristotle indexing/de-indexing of images take a long time. This has been mentioned on several occasions by John Muller and I have had first hand experience where it has taken close to two month to remove old images and ad news ones. If it the images must be removed quickly you can try the url removal tool in GSC.

I doubt that the robots.txt method will be any faster.

[not2easy]

According to Google [support.google.com] you can prevent all images from appearing in search results by adding a few lines to your robots.txt file:

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

[aristotle]

Thanks for the replies. I'll probably wait a little before I do anything else. Eventually I plan to use some of those images on a different website, but don't have that new page ready yet.

In the meantime I would like to ask about pinterest. The current no-indexed page gets some traffic from pinterest, and I see a pinterest bot in my logs fairly often. I'm wondering what would happen if I later 301 re-direct the current no-indexed page to the new page on the other site when it is ready.

Most likely the pinterest bot will "follow" the 301 to the new page. I've never used pinterest so am wondering what the site does in cases like this. Does it update its links to the new page?

Also, what if an image is on the old page but not on the new page? What does pinterest do in that case?

Thanks again