is there any magic code I can use to keep my image pages out of Google
searches without creating the security nightmare of requiring
password/login. It's a privacey issue afterall, right mate?

Hi there!

I don't know so much about *magic*, but there are ways to get the
Googlebot to go about its business without bothering you.

To keep your images out of the Google Image Search, you need to
implement a robots.txt file:

"f you need an image removed from Google's image index we require
participation either by you or by the site's webmaster. Please add a
robots.txt file to the root of the server. (If you can't put it in the
server root, you can put it at directory level.)

Example: If your site is www.yoursite.com/images/dogs.jpg and you want
Google to exclude the dogs.jpg image found on your site, you need to
create a page called www.yoursite.com/robots.txt and on this page you
need to place the following text:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg

To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the
following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /                   

This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for
excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on
robots.txt is available here:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html."

Remove Content From Google's Image Search
http://images.google.com/remove.html#images

To keep your image pages out of the regular Google Search, without
excluding the rest of your site, you need only insert simple meta tag
on the pages you don't want indexed:

<meta name="robots" content="none">

This tells all spiders to go away and not bother that page.

You can find more explanations of helpful meta tags here:

Meta Tags and Their Uses
http://www.clickfire.com/tools/freeware/metty/meta%20tags/

Hope that helps!

--Missy

Search terms:  [ "no index" tags ]

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Request for Answer Clarification by dickname-ga on 21 Jan 2004 09:16 PST

I was given the answer:

To keep your image pages out of the regular Google Search, without
excluding the rest of your site, you need only insert simple meta tag
on the pages you don't want indexed:

<meta name="robots" content="none">

Which I did, but it did not work!  Help!

---

Clarification of Answer by missy-ga on 21 Jan 2004 09:50 PST

It's not instantaneous.  The changes won't take effect until the
Googlebot next attempts to crawl your site.

If it's imperative that you get the pages out as soon as possible, use
the Removal Tool (you'll have to register):

Remove your URL or Google Groups Post
http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller

Other removal information can be found here:

Remove Content from Google's Index
://www.google.com/remove.html

--M

Everything I needed to know... thanks.