Steven Zahm@ Michael
You need to add rules to your robots.txt file to prevent Google and other search engines from crawling the ../wp-content/uploads/connections-images/ folder.
Here’s a very through tutorial/overview of the robots.txt file:
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-create-and-configure-your-robots-txt-file
Additionally, you can add the no indexing rule to an .htaccess file. I use to do this automatically but unfortunately some hosts would return 404 errors for the images due to the way the server was configured.
That said, something like this should do the trick:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-*
This should actually prevent all search engines from indexing all files and folders within any folder that begins with wp-. And the .htaccess go into your site’s root folder where the wp-config.php file is. You likely already have this file, so you would simply add this to the top of the file.
A more conservative `.htaccess rule would be:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/connections-images/*
Options -Indexes
You would create a new .htaccess file and put it in the ../wp-content/uploads/connections-images/ folder.
After you make these changes… you need to remove the links from the Google index. You can do this by using the Google Webmaster Tools. You can opt not to do this and the images will eventually be removed by Google since they will no longer be indexable.
Hope that helps!