Froogle & Googlebot-Image

How to have a few products in Froogle but protect other images

[meowmix]

I submit a few products to Froogle via the data feed. The images for those are in a separate directory and it's working fine.

I'd like to keep the rest of my product images from being spidered by Googlebot-Image and other image bots, because of copyright and also to reduce bandwidth.

I've read that if I disallow Googlebot-Image via a robots.txt file, it will cause problems with Froogle. I thought I read this in the Froogle Merchant section, but now I can't find it. But it's stated here in some of the related threads.

Is it possible to keep most of my product images from being spidered, while still allowing a few for the Froogle data feed?

Thanks for your help.

[Robino]

They're different. You can block Googlebot-Image without affecting Froogle.

[Chico_Loco]

Actually, I believe you are correct.

I've noticed that after uploading feeds, they spider images in those feeds with a bot user-agent "Googlebot-Images".

I assume that if you blocked that user-agent it would cause problems?!

[Robino]

I would just like to update this thread.

Google just sent me an email saying that blocking Googlebot-Image will cause your images to be excluded from all Google domains.

Dang!

[topr8]

why don't you disallow it for all directories except the one you want to allow it to see, whats the problem? you don't need to ban it from everywhere.

[Robino]

"IMAGE BOT"

What good would blocking the image bot from other directories be?

I don't like showing up in the Google image search. And now there's no way to prevent it.