Andrew Davis from the CPC Strategy blog informed me of a Google Merchant Center Help thread where dozens of Yahoo Store Merchants are complaining that their product images are not showing up in Google Image Search and the images are not showing up in Google Product Search and Product Ad results.

The reason appears to be because Yahoo recently decided to block Googlebot-Images from crawling the store’s images. Do to this block, these merchants products won’t show up in Google Image Search but more importantly is preventing the images and so other data from showing up in Google Product Search and the AdWords Product Ad results.

Andrew received a notification from Google that informed him of this, it read:

One person received a response from Yahoo on this where Yahoo downplayed the importance of merchants needing Google and other search engines from accessing and indexing their images. Yahoo said:

Seriously? Yahoo! Seriously?

Forum discussion at Google Merchant Center Help.