Get Only Relevant Traffic from Image Search: Block Non-Content Images
More and more people are searching for images over the Internet. This results into tons of untargeted traffic that means more spam, more pain for servers and no benefit at all.
The thing is most popular search engines (including Google) is text-based. It won’t know that your image is about flowers if you call it apple.jpg, use “apple” in the alt text or just tell something about apples in the text located near the image.
Therefore there are still so many confusing images in Google search results.
But there’s a good solution to make Google’s image search bot’s job easier: this tip was mentioned in the recent Vanessa Fox’s post on image optimization:
It is recommended to block non-content images (purely descriptive) for two reasons:
- To exclude them from search results;
- To save crawler’s time that will discover something useful instead of that.
To block non-content images you should:
- Place them in a separate folder from your content images
- Block that folder using robots.txt.
For instance, if you place these images in a folder called no_index_images, your robots.txt file would contain:
User-agent: *Disallow: /no_index_images/
Any other image optimization tips?
10 Responses to “Get Only Relevant Traffic from Image Search: Block Non-Content Images”
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Wow… unbelieveable i am the first who gives comment right here
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Very interesting. I agree it’s important to give distinctive names to images and use alt tags to further clarify.
As I understand it, a non-content image is something like a quote, special bullets (round blue or other colors, stars). If someone visits looking for bullet icons then you know they will bounce without reading your content. My question: is it really worth creating a special folder for a few dozen of these? Also how would you handle calling up those images as part of a post? Would the WP editor pick up multiple image files?
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Ann Smarty Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 1:07 pm
It is only worth doing if you have quite a few non-content images and also if you get irrelevant search referrals for them.
As for wp editor, you can always add an image via direct file URL.
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I would think that simply leaving the Alt tag blank would be sufficient for non-content images, however Brian Brown comments on Vanessa’s article that Google still indexes these images.
This seems strange to me. If the Alt tags are empty, how does Google index them?
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Ann Smarty Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Like I said, Google uses many signals to index and translate images: alt text, file name, surrounding text, etc. So not having an alt text doesn’t mean Google won’t “see” an image.
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But everyone who knows a little SEO and common sense doesn’t do like giving alt, title and text around as apples, to the pic flowers. So why should you worry about blocking. We give only relevant text to the pic. Isn’t it?
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See my comment above
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Thanks for informative post. It’s good block non-content images and save crawler’s time.
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Alt tags are really helpful for driving relevant traffic from image search. Thanks for sharing such a nice information
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Smart post, I didn’t ever think about this as being a possibility.
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