I have someone hotlinking my images and was wondering how this can effect my SEO efforts. The images are fairly small in size, currently the hotlinking does not bog down my network, and I do not pay additional money for bandwidth, so I am less concerned with that. I would like to get other people opinions about how this effects my SEO efforts, do you think this is a positive effect or negative effect?? I don't like hotlinkers or leechers therefore I am considering cutting off this leecher, but I want to first know if there is any benefit to me.
it has no affect on SEO. hosting things on your own server makes your options explode expotentially, however. there's no reason not to host them on your own server considering how cheap it is to get hosting.
agreed, it doesn't hurt your SEO rankings at all, but it could lead to some very destructive things to your website. I've done things like iframe-injections to people hotlinking to my site and they found some very nasty things on their site the next day. Hotlinking is considered rude -- unless they allow it (like imageshack).
even with imageshack it's very unprofessional if this is a major site. it looks tacky and even imageshack can pull stuff with enough BW usage. for all you know they might go out of business tomorrow and all your images are dead. not a good thing.
I guess my question should be does image backlinks have any effect on PageRank or the SERPs (positive or negative)? Because, in my web server logs the site is a top referrer, making it seem as if my site is garnering much traffic, but it is actually the images just being viewed. Do SE's take this into account when counting backlinks? If not then how should I proceed with blocking hotlinking? I use IIS for my web server, any advice? I have been looking into using ISAPI-rewrite to block hotlinking, but do anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks.
SE's only count images for backlinks based on what they're linking to, not where they're hosted. and: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=iis+block+hotlinking&btnG=Google+Search
I have a site from which the images get hotlinked all the time and I'm almost certain that the hotlinking has a huge impact on the SERPS of image search engines. I get more traffic to that site from Google Images than I do from Google itself. Of course, I name the images well and use good alt text but still, the hotlinking seems to make it grow exponentially. When you think about it it makes sense. What's the difference between a hotlinked image and a backlink? Nothing really, except you get to view the image on the first site you're at without having to click through.. If a search engine sees thousands of hotlinks to a particular image, to me it screams that that image is something good!!
This was my thinking, but I wasn't sure. The site proves to send a lot of traffic. I was wondering if I was benefiting in any way from the hotlinked traffic, even though the traffic was not coming directly to my site. I get at least 10,000+ hits a day for the images, I assume the SE's are seeing this as a positive thing. I am now interested to see if this can work towards my benefit, I think I will test this out some and use the "alt text" and play with this for a while. But, I am still interested in hearing advice from anyone about blocking hotlinks in IIS. Thanks for chiming in ontheweb! Thanks "disgust" for your link to Google Search.
I wasn't aware that could be done. I have always changed the pictures they were getting. Care to point me into the right direction to see how this works? Thanks
It's funny because I see the hotlinking as a definite sign that your content is good I often put a watermark domain name on the images and you'd be surprised how many people will type it in (I use a different domain name on the images and that domain is that is parked over the main domain so I can distinguish where the traffic is coming from). Sometimes I think about doing something regarding the hotlinking down the track.. perhaps advertising something I'm pushing (for you, you'd have 10,000 views per day on anything you want to push ).. And occasionally I think really nasty.. could I have the server send something other than an image that has been hotlinked to....? And no worries about chiming in.. it's a good discussion. Would be good if Google could mythbust this one once and for all
HotLinkStop Description: HotLinkStop is a proven easy to configure high performance NT IIS3+ ISAPI Hotlinking filter primarily intended to block unwanted linking(hotlinking) of images/zip files/pdf etc. files from other sites. (HotLinking or link hijacking) e.g. a GeoCity web site linking to your image collection to increase performance on their own site or a unsavory web site linking to your web site and its content making it appear you endorse them. Company identity theft or even helping to prevent "phishing". Download Friend uses this...