For a base small business website that does not sell pics, or have pics representing it's products, I am curious as to your opinion about hiding the images folder from search engines. Good, bad, indifferent?

Indifferent really, though it depends what the images are and whether you mind search engines indexing asset folders

I think it's a decision based on the business/website. Personally I would hide the images folder by default, unless there are opportunities to title and tag certain images extra-appropriately, so as to rank them in Google Image search.

Although I personally never thought it would make a huge difference I did come across this

 

http://econsultancy.com/blog/63443-how-to-optimise-your-images-for-seo

 

It seems to contradict my theories and assumptions ( not entirely though, but a little ) as although it's titled 'how to optimise your images for seo' it does hit on statistics for when people search using images whether the company they are searching for has anything to do with images, photos or pictures at all people still may search for image representations of a product.

 

Image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google Searches and 5% of all search is image related.

Edited February 8, 201412 yr by Fuzzy Logic

You can get some traffic from images too (LoveIt, Pinterest, Google or Yahoo! or Bing Image Search). I wouldn't hide them if I were you.