Would Google penalise site, if I blocked it from images or other parts

[glitterball]

In view of the two recent threads, about moving on from Google, I wonder has anyone actually taken action and removed parts of their sites (e.g. /images/) from Google?

Why would anyone do this?
My older sites are dependent on search and have had steadily declining traffic over the last few years, so no advantage there.
However, my newer sites receive nearly all of their traffic from Social media and get virtually no quality traffic (monetisable) from Google.
It would save a lot of bandwidth to deny Google access to images and prevent them from hotlinking (stealing) my images in Google Image search.

Obviously, I would still like my website to come up for a search for my website's name or domain name - most Google traffic seams to be from people searching for the domain name anyway.

Has anyone ever blocked Google from their images folder or large parts of their site?
If so, can your website's homepage still be found in Google?
Does your site appear at the top of the results for your website's name?

It may seem like madness, but given the seemingly endless declines in traffic from Google, the image hotlinking and zombie-traffic, we may yet reach a point where the Googlebot doesn't justify the bandwidth that it consumes.

The two threads:
[webmasterworld.com ]
[webmasterworld.com ]

[JesterMagic]

I have never blocked images from Google but have blocked certain small sections of my site (like displaying a list of users, or pages of web pages designed to be printed). I know many other webmasters block images from Google as they do not want others to find their images easily in Google Image search and acquire them for their own websites.

Google does not penalise sites for blocking content from being indexed. It just means that you will not get any possible traffic from those pages. Also if you have any links to that content I am pretty sure they wouldn't count to your sites overall rank.

[Wilburforce]

Google does not penalise sites for blocking content from being indexed

Maybe not "penalise" in its strictest sense (and maybe pages, not sites), but if your pages do better when G can access all assets, then ipso facto they do worse if you block assets (see e.g. [webmasterworld.com ]).

Obviously this has to be weighed against other factors (including the effect of hotlinking on bandwidth), but I wouldn't personally assume that blocking access to page resources/assets will have no effect on SERPs.

Obviously, also, content that isn't indexed doesn't rank.

[iamlost]

I've blocked all SEs from images for years; I also block their image bots. Never been a problem.

Further, I currently block almost half my pages and again never had a problem.

[keyplyr]

your pages do better when G can access all assets

Absolutely, especially the last couple years.

[glitterball]

I've blocked all SEs from images for years; I also block their image bots. Never been a problem.

Further, I currently block almost half my pages and again never had a problem.

Do you block all images, including site logos and other graphic design elements or just "content" images?

[iamlost]

Do you block all images, including site logos and other graphic design elements or just "content" images?

Ah, good distinction.
Initially, as I had all images in same place blocked everything. Later, as I realised that favicons and logos had marketing value I moved them to a SE accessible folder.

One problem with recent/current SE behaviour is found in the following Google search info page quote:

When crawlers find a webpage, our systems render the content of the page, just as a browser does.

So I opened, slightly, content images (and other graphic design elements; as you describe it) files for nonblocked pages but with a limiting header response:

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"

This still blocks them from SE public use but allows them to render page internally.

Blocking is a rather amorphous exercise :) depending upon both what others attempt and upon one's own business requirements.

[glitterball]

@iamlost Thanks for that very informative answer. I hadn't thought of returning a noindex header for the images themselves.

[Writerly]

To my knowledge, Google will not penalize your website if you block certain parts of it. However, the overall ranking will definitely get lower. Instead of blocking some the photos, why don't you just try with nofollow tag for the sections of your website that you don't want to be seen? If they are not indexed, they will not be ranked in Google.

Make sure that you are using the right HTML <META> tag to tell robots not to scan your website for link, and not to index the content of your website. If you are using the robots <META> tag, robots can ignore your <META> tag, and the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page.

[glitterball]

My main issue is that Google steals my images (hotlinking) and gives nothing in return.
Even if I returned a noindex header for the image, googlebot would still eat the bandwidth, so after some thought, there's not much point to that.

Seems we'll just have to wait for the EC to slap Google with another multi-billion dollar fine over Google Image Search, as there's not much we else we can do about it ourselves.