MyWay and Live Search are stealing images – how to block them?

  • In the last month Live Search and MyWay have turned into total thieves for all sorts of images. They don’t even list the name of the blog or page, as Google does!

    For Live Search ( by Microsoft) there is just a big page of images. Their tagline is: Find free images online. To steal. There is no indication that this artwork belongs to anybody. They are treating it like a page of clip art. Nor does anyone get any traffic from them of course, since there are no names listed.

    You can click on the image and put it in a clipboard. When you want to copy it, just go ahead. That is when you go to the page. But the first link, above the actual blog or web page is the link to the image, so it encourages hotlinking. The bottom of their page says, images MAY be copyrighted.

    MyWay doesn’t even say anything about copyright anywhere. It gives you the dimensions and size of the picture as well as the jpg name. Both sites allow you to copy thumbnails of any image immediately without going to the original page.

    I don’t see any purpose in having bots and search engines copying any of my artwork anymore. I don’t care about traffic. I want to block these two search engines for sure.

    Does anyone know how to nofollow just them? If I put their homepage in htaccess to block them, will that work? I want to keep google, because I need my text out there. I was thinking, I would like to put nofollow just on my uploads file, where all my images are. Is there a way to do that, either in htaccess or another way?

    Thanks so much. We have to protect art and photographs just as we do writing.

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  • Thread Starter Drawer

    (@drawer)

    To add to this, is there a plugin to change an image once it is already uploaded to mysql? Is this what dynamic means? I would like to go through all my images that are already uploaded and put a copyright symbol in them, but I don’t know whether it’s at all possible to do that.

    Your experience and advice very welcome.

    You could set up a robots.txt file which would help you with some of this.

    Make a new file, call it robots.txt and it goes in the root directory of installation, ie where wp-config is.

    in it you’ll want something like this:

    User-agent: Live Search
Disallow: /
User-agent: MyWay
Disallow: /

    you’ll need to search to check the actual robot names, and that should stop the named robots from crawling your site altogether.

    to stop them crawling certain files, use:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads

    that should stop all robots crawling your uploads directory.

    There is quite a lot that’s possible with the robots.txt file, but I’m not sure enough to advise fully, so would suggest you look around a site such as this: https://www.robotstxt.org

    Hope that’s of some help.

    Make a new file, call it robots.txt and it goes in the root directory of installation, ie where wp-config is.

    actually, thats only true if wordpress is installed at the root of the domain.

    robots.txt files always live at the root of the domain. therefore if the blog is installed in a sub-directory, the above statement (call it robots.txt and it goes in the root directory of installation, ie where wp-config is..) is not accurate.

    again, robots.txt files always live in the root of the domain or in toehr words, in the top-level directory of your web server.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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