My images- should I allow it to crawl?

[Teknorat]

Ok I have an images folder that is used for the images on the site (products) however many of these are our own images and so there are ownership concerns. At the moment the robots.txt is set to disallow access to that folder. My question is with Froogle going international in the future is there any reason why I should allow access to this? Does google prefer to have access to images or not?

:D

[farside847]

While Im sure lack of images will not reduce your listed products in froogle, it might reduce your click throughs.

Listings with images surely get more clicks than those without.

[Teknorat]

Ah- will Froogle still display my pictures? Although it is told not to crawl the pictures are completely accessible.

[pmac]

From the merchant information page.

Merchants who meet Froogle's criteria and want to submit a data feed must allow Google to crawl their websites by removing any robots.txt files that disallow our Googlebot spider.

Also talked about here [webmasterworld.com].

[Teknorat]

Thank You very much! This site is useful but it takes a while to get an answer sometimes.

[martyt]

I just submitted my first feed a few days ago and got an e-mail last night advising that I need to give googlebot a specific entry in my robots.txt file so the crawler can visit the images directory. But they want me to give googlebot *complete* access:

Agent: googlebot
Disallow:

There's a *huge* difference between allowing googlebot into a specific directory where the images are, and giving it free run over the enitre web site.

I have plenty of content that googlebot doesn't need to bother itself with, but have removed the restriction on the images folder to appease them. If that's not good enough, I guess I'll rethink whether I really need a froogle feed or not.

Why would they possibly need *complete* unrestricted access to the site anyway?

[pmac]

Marty, I would try and clarify that with them. I exclude googlebot from parts of my sites with robots.txt and have no image issues at all.