One of our images on Google Images is from a no-deleted file and is leading viewers to a 404 not found page; is there any way to update Google so it doesn't index this? Or is it just a matter of time.....


Dom

www.nordicarts.com

If you dont want Google to index a certain file you need to change this in the 'robots.txt' file

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: filename.jpg

The * is used for using to apply the settings to all search bots

Your must upload the robots.txt into your main directory ( http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt )

Hope this helps

-James

Originally Posted by dommyb

One of our images on Google Images is from a no-deleted file and is leading viewers to a 404 not found page; is there any way to update Google so it doesn't index this? Or is it just a matter of time.....

Are you sure it is Google that is sending the traffic there and not a broken link in one of your files? You may want to run a check to see if there is link.

As for the robots.txt file while you can list individual files to not be indexed ... oft better to use a little organization and keep all your images in one directory. Then you would put an exclusion for that directory in your robots.txt file.

I am pretty sure that the image might be due to a broken link though. If not and it is just a bad reference in the Google index, give it some time and it will go away.

Normally though, a 404 error is not normally generated for images unless that image is used as an anchor link. In that case you should have a custom 404 to redirect the user back to either your Home Page or create a custom page for it.