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Current Version: 5.2.5 | Sytist Manual | Common Issues | Feature Requests
Passcode Protected Photos Showing Up In Image Search
I have galleries which contain password protected photos.
Once clients use the passcode, they see a page with an example image and text, followed by the uploaded photos.
Those example images, which are simply pasted into the text at the top of the page are appearing in searches for my website. Duckduckgo in particular shows more of them than a google image search.
Is there a way to avoid this, apart from not pasting images into the text box at the top of the password protected page?
Not within Sytist. Google search on using a robots.txt file to block images or a folder of images from being indexed.
My Email Address: info@picturespro.com
Ok thanks, will try that out.
I have added a robots.txt file to what appears to be the appropriate location.
I note that there is also a robots.php file already there.
Not knowing how these things work, is it ok to leave both in place (and will everything work as intended) or does the robots.php file need amending (I wouldn't know how!) Will they conflict?
The culprit here is DuckDuckGo, which reveals images in password-protected galleries whereas google doesn't!
I added:
Update: this appears not to have worked with DuckDuckGo, which means the public may see images of children for which photo consent (outside a passsword-protected gallery) is not allowed.
It also means people can download images without needing the access code.
Gemini suggests this: (Not knowing much about web development, will this work and how do i do it?)
1. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines (SEO)
- Use the "noindex" meta tag:
- This is the most direct way to prevent search engines from indexing specific pages or images.
- Add the following code to the
<head>section of the HTML for the gallery pages:<meta name="robots" content="noindex"><br><br><br><br><tunable-selection-menu><br></tunable-selection-menu>
If you are putting images in the text of a gallery, then they are probably getting into the meta data for the page which will be available to search engines. And it would only be crawling those sample photos, not the photos within the gallery itself.
For the robots.txt file, that looks correct. By you need to also add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /sy-misc/
Disallow: /sy-photos/
Those are where the photos are saved.
My Email Address: info@picturespro.com
So my robots.txt file now looks like this:
Disallow: /sy-photos/
and the location is here (see attached photos), in same folder as index.php
I can confirm that these images are not in the text of the password-protected pages.
1) Some of the photos I can see in a DuckDuckGo image search *were originally in text sections of password-protected pages, but haven't been for a year.
Am I right in thinking that once a page is crawled, the results can show up for a while in searches even though content is removed?
2) I can find *some images which have never been in the text section, have always been in password-protected galleries and *are showing up. Will the amendment to robots.txt sort this?
3) If not, is this an option going forward, and how would the code need adjusting if so?
- Add the following code to the
<head>section of the HTML for the gallery pages:<meta name="robots" content="noindex"><br><br><br><br><tunable-selection-menu><br></tunable-selection-menu>
Updating the robots file should help moving forward. You may have to ask duckduckgo to remove your images from their index.
You can add this to you Design -> Header & Footer -> Head Code, but that will block ALL your pages from being in search engines.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Do NOT add <br><br><br><br><tunable-selection-menu><br></tunable-selection-menu>
My Email Address: info@picturespro.com
Ok, many thanks.
So it's only possible to use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on the entire site, rather than in /clients/ downwards?
Yes it is only possible to add that meta tag to the entire site. The robots.txt file should be suffecient now.
My Email Address: info@picturespro.com
So after adding the required robots.toxt file, and a few months hence, those ten images (which used to be the first image in a gallery) still show up in a duckduckgo or Bing search (I believe DDG uses Bing for its results
I have now just deleted them from my website completely and uploaded them again so they have a different id.
At least they now return a 404 error when an attempt is made to view the original file.
I tried investigating bing support but it seems you can only report content on other sites and not request anything concerning your own unless you verify your site with Bing.
Is that the way forward now?
It sounds like you will have to create a Bing Webmaster Tools account:
To request the removal of images from Bing image search results that are hosted on your site, use the Bing Content Removal Tool by signing into your Bing Webmaster Tools account and providing the URLs of the pages or images you want to remove
But Bing should obey the robots.txt file.
My Email Address: info@picturespro.com
Ok, thanks for the confirmation.
Thank you for this, my question is does this apply if you use the "move your images to amazon s3" option when uploading?
Thank you.
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