Comments on: Should I block Google Images search?

By: Tharrrr be ads on this herrrre site! | Hi, I’m Colin Devroe.

Tharrrr be ads on this herrrre site! | Hi, I’m Colin Devroe. — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:50:08 +0000

[...] those coming from search engines do not take part in the conversation. We’ve talked about the traffic I get from Google Images and I wanted to somehow get some sort of return on that traffic. Again, I have no idea if this will [...]

By: Colin Devroe

Colin Devroe — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:21:57 +0000

Elliot: I suppose by “worthless” I meant that I couldn’t derive any value from the hit. I’m not only speaking of subscriptions to my feed - I’m talking about engaging in conversation, clicking an ad for revenue, etc. Not everyone that comes to my site subscribes, and I’m fine with that - but I do like when people participate at some level. Like you! Thanks.

Daniel: Good suggestion, only that’d still be loading a file from my host. I’m thinking that if I were to decide to block Google Images - I’d block it altogether.

By: Jo

Jo — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:15:23 +0000

Hey thanks for stopping by my site. I’ll be messing with Viddler soon! Be on the look out!

By: Daniel Nicolas

Daniel Nicolas — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:16:37 +0000

I think it’d be cool if you were able to detect if the referral was from google images, and then if it was, throw up a javascript that covers the entire browser window and welcomes them to your website and links to the front page of your photo section.

That way people who are interested enough to click through actually look at your images, but people who are just trying to steal the image get lost and leave.

By: elliottcable

elliottcable — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:19:08 +0000

I don’t see how the visitors loading the page in a frame affects anything.

The google images header is tiny, around maybe a 15th of the height of the page on my screen…

If visits from search engines just come here, get what they need, and leave… it doesn’t matter if what they need is an image or a snippet of text or a solution to a problem. If what they’re here for is NOT a new feed to subscribe for, then search hits could *all* be classified as useless and worth blocking (the engines, that is, not the referred linkers).

If you’re using lighttpd, here’s a wonderful snippet that may help:
# Deny all bots $HTTP["useragent"] =~ “([bB][oO][tT]|[cC][rR][aA][wW][lL]|[Ss][Pp][IiYy][Dd][Ee][Rr]|Google|Slurp|msn|Scooter|Mercator)” { url.access-deny = ( “” ) }