Search Engine Exclusion

• Disallowing images prevents a website's images from showing up in a search engine's image search results. Aside from the adverse impact this can have on traffic rankings, disallowing images exerts control over how a website is presented in search engines. When webmasters want to keep site visitors from entering sites after an image search, disallowing images in the robots.txt file gives them that ability. Because disallowing all image crawls results in decreased search engine visibility, the benefit of excluding a site's images from search engine results should outweigh the potential loss of traffic before robots.txt file modification takes place.
  
  

Site Exclusivity

• Excluding images from robot crawls of Web domains results in their absence in search engine image results, thereby increasing a website's exclusivity, which webmasters can use as an opportunity to present exclusive website content. Images become accessible to a website's members, for example, yet they remain inaccessible to the general public viewing image search results. This increased level of exclusivity can be exploited to add monetary value to a website because membership-only websites that disallow image crawls can justify membership fees.
  
  

Theft Deterance

• Disallowing image crawls is also a means to deter image theft. Sites that feature images of original work benefit from keeping images out of search engine results. This is a practical advantage for those that use websites for promoting designs or concepts to exclusive clientele that doesn't include the general public.Those in competitive sectors can disallow image crawls to protect their work from image thieves who use stolen images to gain an undeserved competitive edge. Businesses with websites that feature original work, such as those in the advertising, graphic design or architecture sector, should consider disallowing images from search engine results.
  
  

Custom Source Code

• Source codes can be placed into the robots.txt file to enable robot crawling of some of a website's images, but not all of them. Configuring this file to exclude specific image file types, such as GIFs, is an advantage worthy of consideration. For example, strategic directives can instruct crawling robots to bypass images that would reflect poorly on a domain; spacers and other site design elements can be saved in a dedicated image file format and then be excluded from search index indexing. So disallowing images is an advantage to those who seek flexibility in controlling how robots index a site's images.