My $18,000 Mistake

Isn't it allowed to hot link images (as in not hosting them on your site but just using the <img src=""> thing?

That's just something that one WF thread has been talking about. As far as I can remember, he was asking about where he can get images for his website. He asked whether he can get them from Google images and just Photoshop them. We told him not to and that he should just create his own images. Indeed, doing that is really risky and this is a proof.

It is still and will always be best if you just create the images that you will be using and posting on your website. If you do not have the resources and you also do not think that you have the skills, you can just ask a graphic designer to do it for you. Well, at least, that is way better than losing a huge amount.

out of curiosity, what would have happened if, for example, you had taken the images from bing, or some other search?

would you still have been busted?

It´s not so expensive to buy image or graphic online today.
I buy most of my photo on 1 usd each, add my watermark and then add on my website

Of course it can get you banned... what you were doing was blatant plagiarism.

And you sell SEO services? God help your clients...

Google is killing all the websites. They just need a very little reason to do this, and most of times they do without any reason.

I buy images from DepositPhotos.com. I pay $99 per month for a subscription and get 10 images a day. It's a great deal.

I only use images I've purchased or have the okay from a vendor.

FYI: I hired a service to build a niche site some time ago. They screwed up and used a non-licensed image. Because I own the site Getty Images came after me. I had to pay Getty Images $850 FOR ONE UNLICENSED IMAGE. I recouped the cost from the service, but it wasn't cool at all.

So, if you're scooping images, not only can you lose an Adsense account, Getty or whoever owns copyright can ask for hefty damages. If you scoop images with copyright regularly, imagine paying $850 X hundreds of images. That could sink a lot of people. Yes, you can fight them in court, but do you really want to do that ... will cost even more and you could lose.

Ouch! SO your website is suspended? YOu mean deindexed?

Well, as for me, I have never really consider getting Google images for my website or for other purposes. But when I do, I make sure that I use proper citation. And most of the time, I just create my own images just to be safe. You can never really risk getting caught by those long and agonizing ToS.

Because of the copyright issue...

You can outsource image designer to make new images or search photo marketplaces to buy.

Did you lose ALL of your traffic? Did you rely 100% on Google? I can't understand how you can go to $0.

You should have been diversifying and getting traffic from Facebook and other social sources, and also diversifying away from AdSense.

Lesson learnt I guess.

Taking images may be something that a lot of people from here are doing right now. Still, I would never want to do something like that, especially if I am not sure about how to give the credits to their owners. I would still and will always choose to create my own images for my websites.

Thanks for the warning. And, I know some people are going to get offended over what you've said and try to justify how they're using copyright images. But, I'm going to take the warning and learn from your lesson. And, i really appreciate that you would take time to be so candid about this mistake. Hopefully, this won't happen to anyone else.

Well, this can happen just to any other Internet marketer out there, especially to those ones who do not take the time to read the ToS and to those who do not care about giving credits. I really appreciate what InterNauert did right here. He took the time to share his experience for us to learn from it no matter how bad the mistake he did was.

It really is going to be a matter of knowing how to cite your sources. That is what I do sometimes, too. However, there really are times when you encounter images that are not really for public use. And you know what they say, it is better to be safe than sorry.

One thing I'd like to point out is that there is such a thing as fair use in copyright law, which means that there is a certain degree of acceptable use when hotlinking or throwing someone's images on your site. Say you wrote a killer album, and you download and print off someones picture to use as your album cover. That you can't do. You are using their image for monetary gain. But if you decide to hotlink someones picture of their pet schnauser as a pic you want on your super cool dog blog, well there's some leeway there.

It depends on the degree, really. How many celebrity blogs have the same images all over the place? Now if the photographer of the image tells you to take it down, take it down. But the likelihood of a lawsuit is slim and none, and them winning anything is even slimmer because of fair use law. Google is basically just protecting their ass with Adwords, yet they can show images in image search because they aren't gaining any money from them (well, not directly anyways). But Google couldn't charge 10c a click on those images because that would be obviously using peoples images for monetary gain.

Again, I repeat, there's a little button called 'Advanced Search' which also has the option "Free to use or share, even commercially". Use it. Or buy some stock pics for a buck.

One thing I do is source images from manufacturers - they will often provide their photos they take for publicity and press releases if you're writing about their products.

Some of them give me 'press access' to restricted areas of their site which are set up for this purpose.

Yes, Adsense is different because you have to play by Google's rules. Don't we all

Lol, so we all need to buy DSLRs and go take our own pics for adsense sites now?
Because if you're buying stock along with all the other "do gooders" thats a lot of duplicate pics floating around.
Every site I've had, 99% of affiliate sites I've seen, and a site making $5K+ per day with adsense are All using images pulled straight from google images.

I had one company request I take a pic down during the last 5 years which I did. However if somebody tried to weasel $850 out of me for using a pic I'd tell them to get bent.

OP your mistake was using a google site, you had no control, and just like YT someone can flag you and all your work can be wiped out overnight. Stick with your own domain & hosting.