Help Centre

Support > Promoting Your Website > Search Engine Optimisation

Why Can't Google Images Index My Pictures?

Google will not be able to display your images on it's cached pages because we block any other sites from pulling images from our customers' websites by default. This is to stop people from stealing your images and using them on their website.

You are unlikely to get any worthwhile visits to your site as a result of coming up in Google's image search. This will predominantly be used by people who are looking for a specific image of something. 

Furthermore many people also believe that Google images is a place where they can go to get 'free pictures' to use on their own sites and don't realise that they are actually taking an image that belongs to somebody else.

However, you can indeed allow this if you would like to by adding your own custom robots.txt file.

To do this please follow the steps below:

  1. Go to your live website and type at the end of your domain name: /robots.txt (for example:
  2. Save the page onto your computer by going to "File" and then "Save As" from the top menu on your browser
  3. Open the file in NotePad (or TextEdit on a mac)
  4. Amend to say:
    user-agent: twitterbot

    user-agent: *
    Allow: /siteimages/
    Disallow: /sitefiles/
    Disallow: /include/
  5. Next, save the file as exactly the following filename:  robots.txt
  6. Log in to your Create account 
  7. Click "Content" from the Top Menu
  8. Click on "Files" area and upload your robots.txt file
  9. Republish your website.

Your robots.txt will now be changed!

Please note, Google will need to re-index your site for these changes to take place.

More Questions?


Get in Touch