disallowing images doesn't affect search results right? only useful if i want to have google index my images as well? (looking to save some bandwidth) sy
If you don't care about people finding your site via things like Google's image search, then by all means disallow your images directory in your robots.txt file. The way I look at it is that people who are doing image searches aren't really in the content of my pages, rather all they want to do is snag images. So I do not allow the images directory to be indexed on any of my sites. This will have no impact on any of your other SEO efforts.
I disagree. If you are getting hits from Googles image search then that is all traffic to your site! So there is an impact on SEO if you block images.
Google also has a service in their sitemap webmaster service that is called "enhanced image search" but you have to enable it for your domain. If you name your images with keywords to your site that can only be a plus i think.
Reread my statement. I didn't say it would have no affect on your SEO efforts I said blocking Google from your images will have no affect on your OTHER SEO efforts. Sure you would lose potential image search traffic, but it isn't going to cost you other forms of traffic. Sometimes people just looking for images isn't really desirable traffic, or at least it isn't worth the bandwidth expense.
I do agree with KLB. If you want to save bandwidth then of course you can do it by dissallowing images on your site. Also you can optimize your images if you haven't done it so far, will improve the speed/accessibility of your site. ATB
When an image is used in place of anchor text, the alt acts as anchor text. Alt attributes for linked images do have some importance when it comes to SEO. Alt attributes on regular images are important for usability (think mobile devices and screen readers) but not for SEO.
saving bandwidth of that kind you also could just delete half of your entire content-pages to save traffic=bandwidth ... if your bandwidth consumption is high means also adsense $ high means you can afford b etter server or hosting package ... YOU are funny guy! hundreds here in DP forum keep on wining about low traffic and you want to throw away traffic and hence throw away adsense-$?? i have a site with many thousand content pages and about 10'000+ pics and i get a substantial amount of traffic thanks to G image search resulting in page views=resulting in CTR on adsense I currently make ab out 50% of all adsense from image pages ( wallpapers, ecards, documentary photography, etc ) without image-indexing no image-traffic - would mean in my case far more than 10k$ / yr less from adsense ... hence instead of disallowing images I optimize images by having relevant tags and every now and then I participate in Google's image labeler program http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ to fine tune my image alt-tags if you have TOP 10-20 pages in G with images in it then you also get top 10-20 pics results in G and hence additional traffic from G=$ to get into image index at G may take days or weeks longer than text pages but when images are in G then traffic comes as well - like an avalanche sometimes.
I have tried to disallow google's image search, but failed. So i just blocked the bot, entirely on my whole directory list.
i am also blog my Images folder in Robots.txt and i don't wants that Google should crawl my Images folders.
I get lots of traffic from images, so allow goole to index images. It will increase my traffic and adsense CPM.