Easily Prevent Search Engines from Indexing Your Stock Photos

If you use the internet, chances are you have uploaded a picture or two over the years. Whether you have uploaded photo albums, social media apps, your blog or website, a professional headshot for your employee profile, a dating website, or some other reason, there are many reasons to upload personal stock photos and photographs. The problem is, your photos are an easy target and can be used by reverse image searches to find information about you that you may not even realize. If for any reason, you want to protect a photograph, image, or from crawling your website, or even reverse image searches from finding your photos with the help of DoNotPay.

How Do Search Engines Find Your Information?

There are different ways that search engines find your website, profiles, and photos.

Search Engine Indexing

When a search engine organizes information before a search, in order to provide those extremely fast responses, it is known as indexing. It does this by first sending out "crawlers" to find new or updated content. Crawling helps search engines find web pages, videos, documents, videos, images, and more.

Reverse Image Searches

You can search for anything with a quick type into a search engine, and even with voice commands now. To find more information about an image, you can upload the image, or paste the image's URL into your search engine tool, and the search engine will provide results for you - this is a reverse image search. Those results may include all websites where the image is found, as well as similar images. As a result, you can actually find the original source or creator of the image, find higher resolution copies, or other information about an image source.

Why Protect Yourself Against These Searches?

There are different reasons for wanting to protect your website or photos from showing up in searches. Unfortunately, there are people who will use your pictures and information to do any number of unscrupulous, unethical and even illegal things. Two of the biggest reasons come down to privacy and safety.

Protect your information from being tracked or traced back to you for the purpose of harassing or cyberstalking you
Prevent people from obtaining private or personal information about you that can be used for fraud or identity theft

By blocking reverse image searches or blocking your pages and resources from being indexed, you can take extra precautions to protect yourself online.

How to Prevent Search Engine Indexing

If, for some reason, you want to , you'll need a little time and technical know-how. Here are a few things you'll need to know about preventing a page or resource from appearing in Google Search:

Include a noindex tag or header in the HTTP response
Googlebot will drop the page entirely when it next crawls the page and finds the tag or header
The page/resource cannot be blocked by a robots.txt file - it must be accessible to the crawler - otherwise, it can still show up in search results
You can add noindex as atag which will prevent most search engine web crawlers from indexing the page, or one that will only prevent Google web crawlers from indexing your page.
Alternatively, you can use an X-Robots-Tag which also instructs crawlers not to index a page
If you have recently added these tags, you can request Google to recrawl page
Make sure you follow Google's Instructions carefully in order to ensure a successful noindex of your page or pages.
You can prevent images from appearing in search engine results using robots.txt with these Google instructions, but remember, the page itself cannot be blocked from indexing.

For more information, you can contact Google here:

Google Support	Help Page
Google Photos Support	Support
Community	Community FAQs

If you're a little confused or worried about doing this correctly, or are too busy to stress over this, DoNotPay has an easier solution to protecting your photos.

Learn How DoNotPay Can Easily Protect Your Images From Reverse Image Searches

Maybe you just have a couple of photos you want to protect. Whatever the reason, DoNotPay can save you the time and trouble of worrying about them appearing in reverse image searches. There are many methods outlined online for preventing reverse image searches - whether you have heard about using transparent layers or taking two screenshots of the same image, you'll still have to put in the work and take the chance that it actually works. With DoNotPay, we can block Pinterest images, LinkedIn photos, Facebook photos, stock photos, dating website photos, and more from appearing in search engine results. How to beat reverse image search using DoNotPay:

If you want to protect yourself against reverse image search engines but don't know where to start, DoNotPay has you covered in 3 easy steps:

Open Photo Ninja on DoNotPay.
Upload the photo or image you want to cloak and press submit.
Our algorithms will automatically insert hidden changes and cloak your image, so it's no longer recognizable by reverse search engines. The newly generated image will be downloadable from your disputes page!