DOes picture linking help in link building?

Hi dear DPers,

Recently i found that a lot of my images that hosted on my server being used in a lot of websites, well they only use my hosted images but did not link back to me.

DOes this actually help the link building? or it is just a waste of my bandwidth?

 

Nope, it won't benefit you at all. You should be mad about it, actually. Using hosted images without permission is illegal.

 

One strategy to deal with this is to change the locations of all of your pictures and replace them with something pornographic or offensive.

 

Yeah it would only be useless.
You can never get link back to your site.

 

If the image were to link back to your site, you might see a little bit of help if the alt attribute is being used, this is the only way that a search engine will read an image as a backlink, the alt attribute becomes the anchor text in the link.

The images would only affect your bandwidth if they're hot linking to you, if this is the case, then your hosting provider should be able to help you disable hot linking on your server. Or, if you can't figure it out, you could always write your own .htaccess file using the code below.

-------------------------------------------------------

There are 4 variants of this code, experiement with them to find the one that works for you.

To implement this you will need to create a .htaccess file in the stored directory. If your images are in /web/images then you will need to post this .htaccess file in the images directory to prevent hotlinking there.

Note, only enter the tld of your domain. Such as yourdomain.com instead of www.yourdomain.com..

Variant 1

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

Variant 2

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

Variant 3

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

Variant 4

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

-------------------------------------------------------

If they aren't hot linking to you, and you created the images, then you can send them a Cease and Desist letter, telling them to either remove the image from their site, or to provide acknowledgment to you as being the owner of the image with a link back to your site. If they fail to comply, you may seek legal action. More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cease_and_desist

I hope this helps.