images and search engine robots

[mrcrowley]

Is there any advantage to allowing google to access the images on your site?
If theres nothing to gain why not just block /images/ folder with robots.txt?

What i want to know is will images help your seo or will they make no difference, if you block access to your images folder google will still see your alt tags won't it?

I need a little advice to decide whether i block images.
Thanks!

[temi]

I think allowing search engines to crawl your images is a good thing, when people are searching for images that matches and image you have on your site, your image could be served which in my openion help your site exposure

[mrcrowley]

I'm just going off what i've come across in google. What i'm not liking is this. If i find i'm coming up in google for quite a rare product, sometimes the result is linking straight to the image, which loads in its own window with no address bar etc. This is not doing any good at all. Perhaps if i didn't have images indexed it would enhance the importance of my text content?

Getting onto the sidelines a bit my understanding of seo (as a newbie) is that your site is like a bubble and the more content it has in it the less importance each item gets because there are more things to consider. Is this the wrong way to think?

[temi]

what Google tends to do is display the image, and add a link at the bottom that says "view image in its original context" this then displays the image and the text etc around it.
If you don't like it perhaps like you said, you sould find a tag that excludes your images from being spidered

[mrcrowley]

What about my bubble theory, holds any weight?

About images i was also thinking about bandwidth saving and the fact that some of my images are names like ft44.jpg, would search bots still read the alt tag?

Cheers!