Googlebot - Image 1 Grabbing Images

[algarveb]

Over the last couple of days Googlebot has been visiting and grabbing lots of images - has anyone else noticed this?

My site is PR5 and googlebot visits very day for 20 or 30 pages, but since early this week it seems only interested in my images. Checking my raw logs I see that it visits as HTTP/1.0 Googlebot-Image/1.0+

Has anyone else noticed this, or can anyone tell me why this interest in my images may have suddenly increased?

[Pricey]

I'v had normal visits as well as image visits! :D

[RonPK]

Yeah, the ImageBot seems to be awake again - it hasn't been out for quite a while. I can't tell though whether it's updating the existing image index or adding new images.

[ismap]

It is for sure grabbing new images, because some of my newer domains where never visited by Googlebot-Image before!

And a question to think about:
will my rankings for (html)pages drop when I exclude Imagebot through the robots.txt?

[algarveb]

Certainly in my site Imagebot seems to be looking for both new and old images. In the past, has this meant anything to the ranking of html documents?

[SEOPTI]

I thought imagebot is dead? Maybe a zombie :)

[dirkz]

Googlebot seems to be addicted to a client's jpgs :)

[Ally_Cat]

ImageBot has been on our site a lot lately, but is very nicely obeying robots.txt. :)

[dirkz]

will my rankings for (html)pages drop when I exclude Imagebot

Why should they?

[vitaplease]

Yes very hungry mrs imagebot this week.

Anyone remember when she bothered to drop by last time?
I don't think it happens to this extent more than two or three times a year, but I could be wrong.

[ismap]

will my rankings for (html)pages drop when I exclude Imagebot?

Why should they?

Maybe because I'm loosing PR due to giving Googlebot-Image nothing to eat?
Is Googlebot-Image really indepentend from the regular Googlebot?

[RonPK]

Anyone remember when she bothered to drop by last time?

January 1, 2003. But my log archive is far from complete.

[dirkz]

Is Googlebot-Image really indepentend from the regular Googlebot?

This is an entirely different question :)

Now serious: If you block Googlebot from a "normal" page your average PR could decrease (e.g. if this page linked to other pages of yours).

Re images, I don't see any way to lose PR by diallowing them from Googlebot. There are no links in images.

[dcrombie]

I'm getting traffic from UA "ImageBot" but not sure if it's Google or a single user. They took just the images from the front page of one of our sites. The crawl was preceded by a request for robots.txt from the same IP address:

203.192.159.42 - - "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" "Python-urllib/1.15"

[dirkz]

dcrombie, what you see are the people who download your complete site or just your pics with self-written bots, in languages like Perl, Python etc.

Watch out, it can cost a lot of bandwidth and they see none of your advertising ...

[dcrombie]

This one only took 20 images from a site with hundreds - it's a cinema with a database of movies. I was curious whether this was the Google imagebot but I guess not. Anyone know the s/w with this UA?

[dcrombie]

More ImageBot traffic today on six separate websites from:203.192.159.41-44. I'm now blocking the UA ^ImageBot