I am at around 60% of the traffic before the 24th January now. Used the ByREV WP-PICShield - HOTLINK Defencewp plugin, also writing new articles with more texts than before on my image/art related website. Also adding watermarks with the logo now to every image. In february i was down to only 30% of my old traffic so i gained back ground. Still..the solution that people on google land on my site instead of seeing the image in big @ google (yeah i know technically blabla..) and to write more when a smaller context for the images would be enough is everything but a good solution..and normally i would have been at 120-130% of my january traffic instead of the 60% i have now. It sucks that there was no big action by us webmasters together..nearly everyone tried to rescue his own skin (engrish maybe but you get what i mean) instead that we worked together and at least tried to inform people what the image search changes mean for us. I am sure the results are and stay bad and by far not as good as before january for all or almost all of us. Now let's see whats following in the next months. I am damn sure the image search changes was not the last step by google and bing/ MS.
I thought the plugin only works on old images. Did you lose many of your rankings?! Did you lose rankings on your images that you get traffic for? Thanks GBK667.
How long have you been using the plugin? Some people lose their traffic after around 10 days, others after using it for only 2 days.
Hello all, over two months are gone now since the image search change..various wordpress plugins and other methods were developed to cut/prevent google's hotlinking. How about we gather infos about how our websites are going traffic related now, what experiences did you make with plugins..which would you recommend..which ones not? And are there any forms of lawsuits going on against google for their hotlinking yet? To start i ll share my own experiences. February was super bad. I had 3200 unique visitors on the 24th January and it shrinked down to 1200 in the next 5 days, stayed at around 1100-1000. I was using a few htaccess scrips but they did not work that well, was also using imaguard but while the idea of it is great, it was the reason that more and more of the over 20k images on my website were more and more removed during the 2 weeks i used it. I had a few days with only 400! unique visitors per day and was short before resignating. I tried out the ByREV WP-PICShield - HOTLINK Defencewp plugin than which i still use, and while i am not using any watermarks by that plugin, i added a real watermark with the website logo to all new images. The older images returned to their google positions in most cases now and i got back to around 1400 unique visitors per day. Got a jump in traffics on thursday the 21st March to around 1700. Probably through the eastern holidays worldwide. It is raising since that day and currently i am at around 2000-2200. I guess without the image search change i would be at 3500-4000 instead. What are your experiences? Greets RH
Around 80 percent of my traffic goes to images. My traffic dropped by 50 percent after the image search update. I did hear bad things about some plugins. Thanks for the info! I will try out the PIC-Shield plugin and hope for the best. It's pretty devastating and I don't see Google going back to the old update. I just don't think that's how Google works which is why I've been looking into alternative solutions.
My sites have dropped with 60% after 2-3 days of the new image search. Also, I am using watermark and redirect script and the traffic is back to normal or... a little better than before. I think that the traffic should be twice than before the new image search if Google will revert back to the previous image search. We are working hard on promoting and optimizing the sites to grow fast and safe with this new image search. Did anyone knows about Google and lawsuits against it after the new image search? Cheers, GemeWeb
GemeWeb, is the "redirect script" you're using the ByREV WP-PICShield - HOTLINK Defencewp plugin? I think it will take a while for anything to happen with the lawsuits and I honestly don't foresee Google returning to its former algorithm. I hope they do, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
No, I'm not using WP-PICShield or any other plugin. I use a custom script, I talked about it in my last posts. Google has many problems in their "garden", they have many lawsuits because they lost their brain a long time ago and thinks that they rule the world, it's wrong. Just use images.google.de and DuckDuckGo
It's great to find some others discussing the Google Break Dance. Per GBK667's request above, here is my experience with it. First, here's the code that I've been using in .htaccess (change MYSITE to your site if you want to try it): RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} wp-content/uploads/.*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.google.[a-z]{2,4}(.[a-z]{2,4})?/url\?.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=\?.*$ [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.MYSITE.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(.*bot.*|slurp) [NC] RewriteRule ^(wp-content.*)$ /get_posturl?$1 [R=302,L] Code (markup): As you know, this code (along with the plugin) redirects Google's "View original image" button directly to the page on your site with the image instead of just viewing it at Google. The above code also eliminates the "caching" problem which required an intermediate page refresh to get to my page. Here's what happens on my server when this code is installed and the plugin is enabled: 1. As reported by WP-Useronline, the number of users quickly climbs from my usual average of 50 simultaneous users to 500-800 users. 2. Each of those users is viewing a valid URL. 3. My server stats report shows an increase in visits from my typical 10,000 per day to 50,000 per day. 4. The server load jumps from an average of .5 to 5.00 or higher. Superficially, this appears to be really great. I ran like this for several days so I could analyze the results. Now, here's the bad news. Even with about 40,000 additional visits per day... 1. Google Analytics shows zero increase in traffic during this time. 2. Google AdSense showed zero increase in page views. 3. Google AdSense showed zero increase in revenue. In fact, my revenue dropped by about 80%. I noticed that I was only getting .11 cents per click during that time. 4. After disabling Google Break Dance the clicks and revenue continued at that same low rate for about 5 days before starting to come back. I suspect that my good advertisers bailed out because they weren't getting any results (even though they probably were but Google AdSense wasn't detecting the info). So clearly Google Break Dance has some very serious issues with Google Analytics and AdSense. I'm guessing that the redirect code must be blocking those programs from reading traffic and clicks, thus denying me of correct stats and revenue. In addition, there were some other possible side issues (didn't have time to really evaluate these): 1. My Pinterest plugin failed to generate a confirmation image during a submission. 2. Google News stopped adding my new stories to their site. 3. The images in my Feedburner feed were blocked. So I'm offering this information in case anyone wants to compare notes or make suggestions. Thanks!
Thank's a lot for sharing, the information you provided helped us to choose the best image hotlink protection plugin for our websites!
I think and guess you're the developer of WP-PICShield, actually it's a fantastic and awesome free gift to the community while others trying to sell similar wordpress hotlink protection plugins for hundreds of dollars, you released it for free, I highly appreciate your contribution, God bless you! and best of luck for your future.
Google's new image search is definitely far better than the old layout, its easy to navigate to the next images after clicking on an image with a slider like interface. The image results have three links to a site now, "visit site", "visit original image" and the image itself and it increases the number of traffic sources to a site.
I have removed Google (and all search engines) permissions to my images folders (robots.txt) and I'm still rocking - and I'm not being scraped and "pinned" anymore! ALL GOOD.
Blocking Google is a long-term plan for failure. You have to figure out how to co-exist with them. They are too powerful to ignore. I get 90% of my traffic from Google (search and images).