Why would you ever want to hide an image from Google?
For a long time, I had trouble figuring out why my upselling tool for Zen Cart called Checkout Candy was garnering so many hits in comparison to sales. Then one day I was looking at Google Images, and for some reason, I did a search for “candy.” Here’s what I saw:
Checkout Candy was the third page. This was drawing people who wanted “candy,” not “Zen Cart Software.” In fact, a few of them who were not native speakers of english wrote to me to ask how they could buy some candy from me. LOL!
Obviously this is not valuable traffic, and it distorts your statistics, so you want to eliminate it. Fortunately, you can use the robots.txt file to stop the Googlebot from looking at this image. It’s very simple: if the image you want to block is called candy.jpg, you do
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /candy.jpg
Google Analystics helps you find problems like this with your site. It also explains this email. 
Thanks for this, not everything is suitable for open searching at the end of the day!
Comment by Richard — Tuesday, November 11, 2008 @ 11:10 am