Comments on: How to Protect Your Images from Hotlinking

By: Eternal_Howl

Eternal_Howl — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:33:31 +0000

Thanks for the tip. I have had a lot of traffic to a site under construction, and it may be just that I chose a good name, but I do not know as I have not got the counter up yet. So hotlinking disabled. Cheers

By: Rob Reid

Rob Reid — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:28:03 +0000

You will also find that you may bave problems if your site delivers marketing emails that use HTML and directly link to the images to your site users. Unless you create rules to handle every possible type of webmail/email client you will be delivering broken images to your subscribing memebers.

By: Sasa Bogdanovic

Sasa Bogdanovic — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:18:13 +0000

@Alphane Moon, a question maybe just a bit off topic.
I agree that traffic from image search can bring a lot of traffic. Do you know if there is a way to understand using Google Analytics which keywords brought the visitor to your site using Image Search? The problem I am having is that visitors from Image Search are coming to the home page of my blog that has a number of images, at least one per post, so I cannot realize by the landing page neither.

By: anton

anton — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:39:45 +0000

Image search from google can help in page ranking. (My opinion)
The cons is that with the image search, the hotlinkers start poping up and it is quite some work but also fun to get rid of them. Could write up quite some stories with my hotlinkers. Have not seen a way of preventing any hotlinking which really works and is not too intrusive.

By: pbx

pbx — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:02:02 +0000

I get lots of search landings via image search.

By: Louis Liem

Louis Liem — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:05:37 +0000

A lot of people don’t realize they can lose their bandwidth due to hotlinks. People who hotlink mostly don’t realize that they should host the images their own

By: Alphane Moon

Alphane Moon — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:20:28 +0000

Hi Ann,

I have seen many websites rank high with hotlinked pictures in google image search.
Installing a “hotlinking protection” is a very good idea. But google will also rank pages in image search that hotlink to images and where a .htaccess hotlink protection has been installed on the original site. The effect is that a user won’t see the image.
I have also seen that google sometimes lists the original domain some weeks later instead of the hotlinking domain, the way it should be.

Traffic from image search can be enormous.