They only read me for the pictures

The joke is that people only read Playboy for the articles whereas the reality is supposedly that they only look at the pictures. Ironically it appears I could say the same about my blogs, 'cept it would be a joke because people really are looking at just the pictures. The cause has been Google image index which has lead a lot of people find images I've used or created and then post links to them here, there and everywhere. The problem is it actually creates little if any traffic since most people just see the image and never bother to look where it came from.

My most popular image to date has been a frame grab from a movie of the Ariel Atom 2 being test driven on the BBC show Top Gear. It got so popular I ended up adding a watermark with my site URL on it. That seemed to drive some actual hits to this blog, but not nearly as many as the downloads of the image. While I realize there are technologies to stop this kind of "image leeching" they mostly just encourage people to make a copy of the image and host it locally.

I've actually have no problems with the amount of bandwidth used by the image downloads - my bandwidth quota at DreamHost could cope with millions of hits for these images. But I would like to stop the squew on my site statistics caused by people purely searching for images and not written content. So I'm happy that I discovered that Google's image indexing robot can be taught to ignore certain images or all images on a site. Just add to your top-level robots.txt file the following incantation:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/image1.gif
Disallow: /images/image2.gif
Disallow: /images/image3.gif

replacing /images/image1.gif etc. with the path of the images you don't want indexed. To prevent indexing of all images use:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

For more information on taming Google's image indexer see their FAQ