When someone links to images on your server...

by 8 replies
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Well, I just had 6000 hits more than usual today because some russian blog linked directly to one of my images with my website url. I know this is bad because it drains my bandwidth but then I was thinking isn't it also a good thing since google may count this as a dofollow backlink? How does google treat this kinda of thing? I'm talking about the image url itself since unfortunately, a source link wasn't given as credit. It has happened to me before, mostly from foreign sites.

On that same note: I have an htaccess redirect in place for all my images so they actually don't show up on whatever linking website. But apparently some webmasters link to them anyway. :confused: If I do get a backlink benefit from this I would consider changing my redirect. (My host account supposedely has unliminted bandwidth but my site loads slow at times...)

Also, how come these image loads get recorded as visitors and hits in my Cystats program?
#website design #images #links #servers
  • I don't think that Google follow externally hosted images, no. So really all that's happening here is that they are stealing (for want of a less harsh term) your bandwidth.

    And remember that whilst you host says they offer "Unlimited" bandwidth, there isn't such thing - it's a marketing technique If there was, sites like YouTube, Facebook (etc) would be with your host, instead of paying millions per month on hosting like they currently do

    There's a chance that your .htaccess block isn't working. If you have cPanel, try the anti-hotlinking feature they provide. If that doesn't seem to work, then Google it and look for a better .htaccess anti-hotlinking tutorial.
  • you could write to them and ask for link back to you. (image located at...)
    if they don't then block it.
    Nothing wrong with 6000 more people seeing your link daily
  • Put this into your .htaccess:

    domain.tld = your domain + com/net/org


    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?domain.tld [NC]
    RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png|zip|rar)$ - [NC,F,L]
  • I had this happen to me.

    What I did was make a copy of the image. Renamed it. Pointed to it in my web page to it so my site didn't change for my visitors. Then the one they linked to, I made into an advertisement.

    I ended up reverse sucking traffic from them... Got a bunch of sales out of the deal.

    Was one of the best backlinks I had for a while.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [2] replies
    • Haha awesome idea I'll definitely have to give that a go in the future.

      I've heard of people do similar things but replacing the image with... something else (:p), but hadn't though of that. A brilliant way to convert hotlinking into sales
    • Brilliant!
      I've noted this one in my little black book of Devious.
  • Yeah, thats funny! Unfortunately I kinda rely on the image name and location as google image is a big source for my traffic. My htaccess IS working, it's possible that I hadn't set it for that specific image yet. (I use individual folders with individual htaccess for google image site redirects) Thanks for the feedback!
  • Ok, I just enabled hotlinking. This won't block google images cache though, right?
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    When someone links to images on your server...

    Well, I just had 6000 hits more than usual today because some russian blog linked directly to one of my images with my website url. I know this is bad because it drains my bandwidth but then I was thinking isn't it also a good thing since google may count this as a dofollow backlink? How does google treat this kinda of thing? I'm talking about the image url itself since unfortunately, a source link wasn't given as credit. It has happened to me before, mostly from foreign sites. On that same note: I have an htaccess redirect in place for all my images so they actually don't show up on whatever linking website. But apparently some webmasters link to them anyway. :confused: If I do get a backlink benefit from this I would consider changing my redirect. (My host account supposedely has unliminted bandwidth but my site loads slow at times...)