Google changed its emergency as well as non-emergency images removal guideline with new information that provide new clarity to the guidelines.
Removing Images From Search Index
Google offers a variety of methods to take images off the index of search results on an emergency or non-emergency basis.
There are many minor modifications, but these are the subjects that have different degree of change:
- How to remove images quickly.
- What should you do if there’s no connection to the CDN which hosts images, or if the CMS does not provide a method to prevent indexing.
- More information about how to use robots.txt to display images.
- How to use wildcards within robots.txt
- A warning regarding the use of the tags for robots that do not have images.
How To Quickly Remove Images From Index
HTML0 The first change to the document is the following sentence:
“For urgent removal of images To swiftly remove images on your site from the search results of Google Use Removals to remove them from search results. Remember that unless you take the images off your site, or restrict the images in the manner explained in the non-emergency images removal section, images might appear in search results from Google once the removal request is over.”
When There’s No Access To Images On CDN Or By CMS
The second scenario occurs the case where an image is hosted on CDN CDN but due to some reason, they aren’t able to be accessed or the CMS blocks the image.
The additional line:
“If you don’t have access on the server the host for your pictures (for instance, CDN) CDN) and your CMS does not offer the option of blocking images using the noindex XRobots-Tag URL header, or robots.txt it is possible that you will have to remove all images from your website.”
Images And Robots.txt
The next changes are minor additions to two paragraphs that together make the message clearer, with addition of the phrase, “for example https://yoursite.example.com/robots.txt” and some other extra words that are relatively trivial.
The following text refers to robots.txt structure was modified from the following:
“Rules might contain special characters to allow for greater flexibility and greater control. The * character is a match for any sequence of characters patterns could end in $ to signify that the path has ended. pathway.
This is:
“Rules could contain special characters to provide more control and flexibility. Particularly, the * character is a match for every sequence that allows you to match multiple image paths using one rule.”
Change To Guidance On Robots.txt Wildcards
The following modification is more significant as it gives more details about how to utilize wildcards. The term “wildcards” in this instance refers to the the * symbol, which implies that any character can be found.
This is the part:
“# Wildcard character in the filename
Images that have the same suffix:”
It is a form of:
“# Wildcard character in the filename
# images that have the same suffix. For instance,
# animal-picture-UNICORN.jpg and
# animal-picture-SQUIRREL.jpg
# within the “images” directory.
# will be matched with the pattern.”
New Paragraph About Noimageindex Robots Tag
The final of the major modifications is a section which warns about how to use the noimageindex.
The newest phrase:
“Note that putting the robots noimageindex tag to any page will stop images on the page from being indexable. However, if those images appear on different pages, they could be indexed by the pages. To ensure that a specific image is not blocked regardless of the location it appears, you can use the”noindex XRobots-Tag Header of HTTP responses.”
Google Search Central Updating Documentation
This is the latest in an ongoing series of improvements to Google’s documentation. The pages that are lengthy are modified to make them easier to read. Some, like this one are edited to make them more clear.
Take a look at the updated guidelines regarding the removal of pictures from the Google index.
