Remove Image from Google Search

Let’s say you have a few images on your site that you want in articles, but don’t want to show up in Google Image search. There are a few steps you should follow to remove images from Google Search one that makes an immediate removal request and the other which permanently makes it so the image won’t be indexed and show up on Google Image Search.

To remove an image from Google Search this actually comes as a request to take down a page or the URL Removal Tool from Google Web Master tools.

Get the Image Source URL

• Open up the image and get the original hosting page of the image
• You can do this by right clicking on the image and getting the copying the image URL
• Make sure you copy and paste the URL into a text document so you can use it on the URL Removal tool in a later step

URL Removal Tool

Now that you have the image URL’s that you want to remove from showing up in Google Image search it is time to go to Web Master Tools.

• Open up your Google Webmaster Tools
• Click on Optimization > Remove URLs

• Click on create a new removal request
• cut and paste the full URL of the image you want to remove from Google Search listings

• Click yes to remove this page
• Click the submit button next to finalize the URL removal request

Now this is only an immediate removal request, it may show up again unless you block that URL in your Robots.txt file on your web server as well.

Blocking URL’s in Robots.txt

• Edit your robots.txt file or you can use WebMaster Tools to create one.
• Add the following lines to your Robots.txt file

(if you have a user-agent item for Googlebot-Image already then you can just add this disallow statement under it)

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg

The disallow statement should be to the URI path of the images you don’t want to allow in Google Images.  You don’t need the http://www.domainname.com part, just the URI or slug after the domain name here.

• Save the robots.txt file in the root of your web server, this is 1 folder above wp-content if you are using a WordPress blog.

Back in Web Master tools you can test the blocked URLs with the Health option.

Run test at the bottom and make sure it picks up and confirms your new robots.txt changes.

This is how you specifically block or remove image from Google search and will prevent those images from showing up in Google Image Search results, note that if you want to block all images from showing up in Google Search and you run a WordPress blog you can simply disallow the /wp-content/uploads folder and all files/images in this folder won’t show up in Google Image Search.