How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

[zuriatman]

Hi,

I am wondering if anybody could help me with this problem.

I have an online familytree which was software generated which I placed on my website. The family tree contains about a 1000 ID photos. These photos was indexed by the search engine robots and now when I use a browser like Google, select "image" and enter a name search and I will find my mother's photos, my own photos and other family photos being displayed.

How can I stop the Robots indexing the photos from my family tree?

[Karen Mac]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

You use a robots.txt file

user -agent (robot name)
disallow/ statements..(file names)
.heres a generator to assist you

http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Robots/server.shtml

Karen

[karenwms63]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

Heads up...if you make the area for the photos a "password-protected" area, then you don't have to worry about the bots, AND you will find the "long-lost" relatives...just put a form in the unprotected area for them to get a username and password from you or give your email address (I use the email riddler at Dynamic Drive to fight the spam bots)...just a thought...

I have found several relatives thought to be long gone this way.

[zuriatman]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

Hi Karen Mac & Karen Williams,

Thank you for responding.

It is a bit more complicated for the following reasons:

When I first wanted to publish my software generated family tree I consulted some knowledgeable people outside and from this forum and was told it could not be done with BlueVoda.

I tried using an encryption program and BV told me "Unexpected File Format" which means BV does not recognised the encrypted html.

So I experimented without the encryption and placed the "index" file in a Html box in BV and uploaded the rest of the family files and photos with Blue Ftp. to my add-on domain folder and guess what it worked.

I am a geek when it comes to html and scripts.

So if I install a form [Gateway] for all visitors and users to enter their username and password before being able to access the Familytree directly; will this prevent the Bots from indexing the pages?

Can you visit the family tree and view for yourselves whether what was suggested will work?

Family tree

Thanks a lot,

Zuriat.

[karenwms63]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

Very nice photos and layout.

What I was suggesting is password-protecting a folder in your public_html/ through cpanel, not in bv. For example, you could password-protect the folder /salasilah/ that your pictures are in. And each person doesn't necessarily need an individual username and password...we use one name and password for the whole family. And we haven't had any problems with indexing by using this method. However, once your pictures have been indexed, it will be really hard to do anything about it, cause they will be cached by the search engines.

I do not know how it would affect the search engines if you were to password-protect the folder now after being indexed...I would imagine that if someone clicked on the photo, they would have to enter password OR look at the cached version...not sure.

When I first wanted to publish my software generated family tree I consulted some knowledgeable people outside and from this forum and was told it could not be done with BlueVoda.

I would imagine you could ftp this through the file manager of you cpanel and then link your bv pages to it, making sure to put it in the password-protected folder.

KMac is definitely more knowledgeable than I in these matters...I was only suggesting what has been working really good for me, and she is the one who suggested I do this.

[Karen Mac]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

The text file will prevent them from being indexed and you can ask google to remove them from their cache. You can have a password protected folder for images.. but you would also have to have your pages there.. that would elimante the gp from viewing your site without permission. You can make it so they have to have your permission to access.. so using a simple email form requesting permission would be easiest.. however, most time consuming as you would have to approve the view. Or.. you could just email the password to family and friends that you want to have access period and NO public view, or just sample pages to public view..

Karen

[zuriatman]

Re: How to stop the bot from indexing family photos

Hi to both Karens,

Thank you both for your responses. I have to think this out very carefully.

I am going to try encryption again and Ftp all the files and photos directly to my webfolder and link the files to a BV created landing page for the familytree.

Zuriat.