Image Hot-links & Google's Instant Previews

Image Hot-links & Google's Instant Previews - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about apache, search-engines, htaccess, google-search to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Image Hot-links & Google's Instant Previews.Problem :

I'm trying to adjust my site:

1. stop Image Hot-links

2. block Googlebot-Image (because I do not want my images to be searchable)

3. allow Google's Instant Previews

I've tried this but the Instant Previews still do not show my images. (I really do not want to start blocking/allowing by user-agent.) Has anybody achieved it ?

.htaccess

RewriteCond %REQUEST_URI !(favicon.ico)

RewriteCond %HTTP_REFERER !(mydomain.com|google.)

RewriteRule .(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [F]

robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

User-agent: *

Disallow: /phpcart/

Solution :

From the Instant Previews FAQ, it looks like you need to change your method of blocking image search indexing:

In order for images to be embedded in previews, it is important that they are not disallowed by your robots.txt file. In order to block crawlable images from being indexed, you can use the "noindex" x-robots-tag HTTP header element.

...and here's a blog post with a couple ways to implement that.

If Google Instant Previews is not working for your website, you can test it at Google's Webmaster Tools website. Basically, your website must allow access to Googlebot and Instant Previews's user-agents.

If the issue about apache, search-engines, htaccess, google-search is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.