: Prevent indexing of image or file I understand that you can do the following to generally prevent images or pages from getting indexed. Add to the page's meta section: <meta name="robots"

@Heady270

I believe X-Robots-Tag "noindex" is ideal for this case.


Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"


you can see examples of how to noindex png, jp(e)g, and gif files. That's specifically for an Apache .htaccess file. The implementation would be slightly different on other servers - but you get the idea.

If things are not yet indexed, you may also be able to fix the problem with a robots.txt block - but once they're indexed, you'll need to use a noindex to remove them.

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@Ogunnowo487

Will the search engines, in specific Googlebot-Image, honor the request? Index the page to the exclusion of the image in an img tag?


Yes. Regardless of how the image is referenced on your site (img element, CSS background-image, etc.), if it is blocked by robots.txt then Googlebot-Image will be unable to crawl that image, which will most probably prevent that image being indexed and being returned in Google image search.

If pages are blocked from being crawled in robots.txt then they can still be indexed (and potentially returned in the SERPs) if other external pages link to them (although this is a URL only result - no title or description appears in the SERPs as the pages themselves have not been crawled). However, I have not seen a similar result with regards to images. If the image is blocked by robots.txt then it's not indexed.

You can also apply the same robots "meta tag" (specifically, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header in the case of non-HTML resources) to images as you can to pages if you want to, although this will generally be unconditional - applying to all bots and user agents.

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