I use imagegen.ashx to resize images on my Umbraco 4.7 website. It is by default disallowed in robots.txt and images for which I use the handler do not appear in search engines results - I have checked in Google Webmaster that they are blocked. I would like to allow this images to be searched.
- Can I achieve this by allowing the imagegen.ashx in robots.txt?
- I also would like to know is there any good reason why it is disallowed by default?
- And if I make it allowed would it resolve my problem with blocked images or it requires some more configuration changes?
You can safely remove imagegen.ashx from the robots.txt.
So far I know it is not default disallowed in robots.txt Umbraco and ImageGen do not create default a robots.txt (not in recent ImageGen versions)
Images generated with Umbraco and ImageGen can just be found and displayed in Google. There is no risk,
ImageGen has some low risks, An attacker can changing the query string parameter and so repeatedly generate a new unique image, (disk space, cpu cycles) but the image size is limited in the config. and this is independent of the robots.txt