However what if your images are being hot linked so much that your site speed degrades to such a point that people are turned away? This was happening on one of my photoblogs (not listed on my blog roll). I instead now use .htaccess to serve up a generic image (only 10kb) requesting that the people come to my site to see the images instead (with a collage of sample images)… Since the images being hotlinked were from 50kb – 200kb previously, this has substantially cut down on my bandwidth load and the hot links still remain out there pointing back to my website.

Kill two birds with 1 stone, cut down bandwidth, drive more REAL traffic to your site, keep the hotlinks active.

If you SEO the images on your website they may still appear in google image searches as well, but linking back to your site rather than forums / etc (as I believe google caches the images as it crawls?)

I’m not sure about this, but I think when the image is hot linked to a forum, and Google bot will index the image. The result will be, the one who hot linked our image was the one who was referred by the Google bot who was the owner of the image.

We don’t get traffic. The only who got traffic is the one who took the image and post it in their forums.

But, I’m still skeptical whether to remove the image or change the URL of it.

If I change the image URL and delete the image from our server, I’m not sure if the new image will be re indexed quickly.

I think we still benefit if someone hot linked the image, but I also think that we don’t benefit at all because no organic visitors comes to us, unless they will intentionally visit the site where the image came from, but more than 90% of the visitors tend to look at the image only and look at the website where it was embedded and they don’t mind where this image is hosted.

I think the Google bot should be wise enough to determine where the image was hosted and only show that page once the image is click, not the site who embedded the image.

But I also think Google did the right thing. What if the image is hosted in an image host, not a site. It would be useless to show the homepage of the image host, that’s why the site who embedded the image was shown.

But still, it’s still unfair to the one who uploaded to image to his/her blog or website then someone hot linked it.

The one who uploaded is skeptical to stop the hotlink because he/she thinks that if we don’t permit hotlinks, then the chances of getting to the first page of the image results will be much lower.

I hope you got my point. Wooot!

many experimental evidences shows that image hotlinking contributes to contextualize the image: if the original page that hosts an image provides insufficient information about that image, and some pages that have an hotlink to the same image (but also if they duplicate and host the same image theirself) provides information that an engine can read and use, then that image will be contextualized and ranking accordingly.

So, there actually is a benefit when someone hotlinks your images (as long as the engine can spider that pages, and that pages contain relevant information).

Not so long ago, I wrote a piece for a document called “Link building secrets”, and it was about how to build backlinks on images that are likely to be hotlinked. Enjoy the reading ;)