Remove images hosted on your site from search results
For emergency image removal
To quickly remove images hosted on your site from Google's search results, use the Removals tool . Keep in mind that unless you also remove the images from your site or otherwise block the images as described in the non-emergency image removal section , the images may resurface in Google's search results once the removal request expires.
For non-emergency image removal
There are two ways to remove images from your site from Google's search results:
The two methods have the same effect, choose the method that is more convenient for your site. Keep in mind that Googlebot has to crawl the URLs to extract the HTTP headers, so implementing both methods at the same time doesn't make sense.
If you don't have access to the site that's hosting your images (for example a CDN) or your CMS
doesn't provide a way to block images with the noindex
X-Robots-Tag
HTTP
header or robots.txt, you might need to delete the images altogether from your site.
Remove images using robots.txt rules
To prevent images from your site appearing in Google's search results, add a robots.txt
file to the root of the
site that hosts the image, for example https://yoursite.example.com/robots.txt
. While
it takes longer to remove an image from Google's search results using robots.txt rules than it
does to use the Removals tool, it gives you more flexibility and control through the use of
wildcards or subpath blocking. It also applies to all search engines, whereas the Removals tool
only applies to Google.
For example, if you want Google to exclude the dogs.jpg
image that appears on your
site at yoursite.example.com/images/dogs.jpg
, add the following to your robots.txt
file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
The next time Google crawls the dogs.jpg
image, we'll see this rule and drop your
image from our search results.
Rules may include special characters
for more flexibility and control. Specifically, the *
character matches any sequence
of characters which lets you to match multiple image paths with one rule.
To remove multiple images on your site from Google's index, add a disallow
rule for
each image, or if the images share a common pattern such as a suffix in the filename, use a
the *
character in the filename. For example:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image # Repeated 'disallow' rules for each image: Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg Disallow: /images/cats.jpg Disallow: /images/llamas.jpg # Wildcard character in the filename for # images that share a common suffix. For example, # animal-picture-UNICORN.jpg and # animal-picture-SQUIRREL.jpg # in the "images" directory # will be matched by this pattern. Disallow: /images/animal-picture-*.jpg
To remove all the images on your site from our index, place the following rule in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg
but not .gif
images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /*.gif$
By specifying Googlebot-Image
as the User-agent
, the images will be
excluded from Google Images. If you would like to exclude the images from all Google searches
(including Google Search and Google Images), specify the Googlebot
user agent.
Remove images with the noindex
X-Robots-Tag
HTTP header
Alternatively, you can remove images hosted on your site from Google's search results by
adding the noindex
X-Robots-Tag
to the HTTP response headers of the
images you want to remove. In this case you must allow crawling the image URLs in order for
Googlebot to be able to extract the noindex
rule. To implement the noindex
X-Robots-Tag
HTTP response header, follow our documentation about noindex
.
Note that adding the noimageindex
robots tag to a particular page will also prevent
that images embedded in that page from getting indexed. However, if the same images also appear in
other pages, they might get indexed through those pages. To make sure a particular image is
blocked no matter where it appears, use the noindex
X-Robots-Tag
HTTP
response header.
How do I remove images from properties that I don't own?
See the Google Search help documentation on how to remove an image from search results .
