Prevent Google Image Searching

what works

[ukgimp]

I have come across a couple of options to disallow Google form requesting images with the robots.txt.

I need to know if they work.

Method 1
User-Agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Method 2
User-Agent: googlebot
disallow: /*.gif$
disallow: /*.jpg$

I want to stop loads of requests for imaages. Which is best, 1, 2 or? (they are not in any one directory by the way)

Thanks in advance.

[John_Caius]

I use

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

and it works fine.

[ytswy]

Same here

<added>took a significant amount of time before my images dropped out of the index though..</added>

[ukgimp]

Thank you both

[keyplyr]

Just a thought...

Method 2
User-Agent: googlebot
disallow: /*.gif$
disallow: /*.jpg$

Would this screw-up Google's cache of your website?

[Dolemite]

Google doesn't cache images, except thumbnails for the image search. They still load off your server when someone views a cached page.

[jim_w]

I just put this in 24 hours ago...

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.jpg$

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:

When google came thru, it tried to get a page that does not exist anymore and is in the robot.txt to disallow for all.

So I don't know if that screwed it up or if google is having another problem for I put in a bunch of 301s about 30 days ago and it refetched about 3/4 of them and updated the database. All the other ones it keeps getting the 301, but does not come back to fetch the new pages. And tonight, google on one of the pages it had refetched the 301, it tried to get the old page again.

I wish they would get those Jr. people trained, or what ever the problem is fixed. They didn't move part of the operation off shore like some have, have they?