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I have my personal blog website and using Dropbox to host images (through public folders) and use them in my blog website. Is their any way to index those images in search engine like Google.

I have created an image sitemap which contains URLs of images both hosted on my blog directly as well as Dropbox and added that image sitemap to robots.txt. Not sure if this works particularly for Dropbox hosted images??

Google Webmasters portal shows me as a warning "Robots.txt prohibits the URLs" of dropbbox hosted images.

Any way out??

Sachin Dhir
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Images not on your site will not be attributed to your site in Google image search. As well, if Dropbox restricts spidering the images with robots.txt, they will not show up in Google image search at all.

There is no way out short of moving the images to your server which is what I recommend if you want them indexed by Google. I do not know what kind of site you are running. For some, image search is extremely important. For most sites, having images indexed will not add value. For example, I do not recall ever seeing a hit from a Google image search for any of the sites I own or managed with one exception which is a photo gallery. If your site is image based, then I recommend serving your images from your own server if possible.

closetnoc
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Since Dropbox blocks your images via their robots.txt, these will not be indexed. If you want them to be indexed, you need to move them to a 3rd party server not blocking them with a robots.txt.

If you want some SEO benefits too, you need to store your images on your blog website. Makes sure your images have descriptive alt attributes to maximize chances of being indexed. Make sure all your blog pages having some images appear at least in a sitemap.

You can investigate free blog websites such as Blogger.com or Tumbler if you don't want to bear the hosting cost. They have blog import/export features.

Jérôme Verstrynge
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