Hotlinking = Good for SEO?

7 replies
  • SEO
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I have looked at my stats over the past few days and the amount of hotlinked images from my site has jumped dramatically. xxx,xxx worth of requests. I am not happy about people eating my bandwidth and not linking back, but does google see the image links as actual links too? I can't seem to find any information. Because if Google sees the image hotlinks as just deep root links, then I'm all for hotlinking.
#good #hotlinking #seo
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I know for a fact that Yahoo & Google counts the hotlinked images as a free backlink to your site.

    You can verify how Yahoo counts the hotlinked image at Yahoo Explorer, paste the image url (not page url).

    As far as Google counting, check the Google Cache on the page from the guy that stole your image (hotlinked), the url should be intact otherwise the image wouldn't show on their page.

    I have a thread I posted a while back about hotlinking images & getting free backlinks.

    http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...-can-help.html

    You can also run the image url inside seospyglass (free) & see they show the image as a free backlink.
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    • Profile picture of the author ne2
      Originally Posted by yukon View Post

      I know for a fact that Yahoo & Google counts the hotlinked images as a free backlink to your site.
      I realize this thread is a few months old, but I have been researching trying to learn whether it's worth allowing people to hotlink my images and for myself to post my images on other forums, and pretty much everything I've read has firmly said NO, it doesn't help, which blatantly contradicts what yukon said.

      Anybody have thoughts on this?
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by ne2 View Post

        I realize this thread is a few months old, but I have been researching trying to learn whether it's worth allowing people to hotlink my images and for myself to post my images on other forums, and pretty much everything I've read has firmly said NO, it doesn't help, which blatantly contradicts what yukon said.

        Anybody have thoughts on this?

        I deal with a lot of images on multiple sites, which includes a lot of Google Image Search testing.

        Do a Google Image search for the keyword car, tell me what you see:

        1) 2nd place in Google Image

        2) 49 hotlinks (backlinks) Yahoo Explorer

        3) The first place image also has 49 hotlinks (backlinks) in Yahoo Explorer.

        I doubt the hotlinking (backlinks) are a coincidence.



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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Since were on the subject of image seo.

    Here is code I use to break the Google image redirect/frame inside Google Image Search.

    It works 100%, & keeps the searcher on your site rather than Google giving them the option to be sent directly to the image source.

    I've been running this on all my sites since I found the code.

    http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...ml#post3190358
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  • Profile picture of the author HorseStall
    I'd always wondered about this and if hotlinking passed on link juice. I still don't get why webmasters would not host the images themselves, the page loads faster and they can cache the images locally.
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  • Profile picture of the author almondj
    So stolen images do count as hotlinks. So much win. Thanks .
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