hotlinking images, do you get any benfits when it comes to the search engines.

Hi,

I have put up a new section on my site that includes funny pictures. It has been up about 2 weeks now and I have already had a forums hot link one of the large images that is around 97kb's in size. The image has been called from my server about 300 times so far so 300x97=29100

29100/1000=29.1mb's

So as you can see they have already used 29.1mb's of my bandwidth for the month. All they have done is hotlink it and haven't give any credit back to my site for using it as it is a user on the forum that done it and not the site itself.

Now my question is, will I get any benefits from the Google as in the <img src= part of html code on their site it will have my sites url. Will that give me benefits or will it not really do anything.

I was thinking of using hotlinking, but I want these images to get into google yahoo and msn images.

 

There is no link in an <img> tag, so you get no ranking benefit when other sites use your images on their site. Only tags that can send a user from another site to your site give you any ranking benefits. This would include <a>nchor and <area>, but not <img>.

 

I agree with rainborick. And good luck with trying to get a forum to give you credit. Unless you have a tiny tiny host, 29.1MB of bandwidth is nothing. Expect a few GB's per month of hotlinking, but if it gets outrageous Goatse them.

 

I know 29.1mb is nothing, but just 2 weeks into it and I have already lost 29.1mb from 1 person. My site is rather popular so I expect hotlinkers to grow rapidly. I am perdicting about 10 gb's per month or even much more than that. All bandwidth costs and I need as much for my site as possible as I also have videos on it that use considerble amounts of bandwidth.

What happens if I use .htaccess for hotlink prevention, would this mean that I will no longer be able to get the images into google images. As far as I can see, google crawls your site and then creates a thumbnail of each of your sites images and then hosts them thumbnails on their own servers and then links to the image on my server and also shows my site where the image is located in an iframe on their site.

So would hotlinking via .htaccess stop google from including your images into their search. It looks like there is no way that it would prevent them from getting your images, but does anybody actually knows this as I wouldn't want to do it and then find that all my images have gone from Google.

 

Make sure your site tells people they have to link to your site if they want the images. Give them the html code if that helps.

I use 500GB a month in hotlinked images but most of the sites link back so its OK.

 

I think you do get some benefits, such as google will crawl those sites, and index those images, those images will be pointing to your site.
You can get them to leave a link back, by putting a box of html code for them to copy.. that way, you also benefit from the backlinks.

 

I would prefer them not to link to the images at all, but still have my images listed in Google, Yahoo and MSN image search. Is that possible using .htaccess and hotlink protection.

 

I think there's a way to stop hotlinking in cPanel, if your host uses that.

 

I know you can do it via cPanel. I have been doing coding for 6 years now and have hotlink protection all over many parts of my site which I mainly do it via PHP as it is much better than .htaccess when you don't have to do it with images.

So if I use hot link protection, do you think google search will not be able to get them?

 

Do as this site does:
http://upqt.com/displaythumb.asp?image=32299

Then you will receive backlinks

 

Let me repeat, when another site uses your images, it does not help your rankings in the text searches in any way. Heaven only knows how the image searches get ranked, but the text search bots do not follow the src attribute of <img> tags. No help. Zero. Zilch. Bupkis. Nil. Nada. Nichivo. Niente.

 

But just because I offer that doesn't mean that people will stop hotlinking the large images. They will still attemp it.

I'm starting to think I better put hotlinking on the large images and just leave the small images and hope that they get into the search engines images section instead.

What do you guys think. How I see it is that I am going to become really big and the bigger you become the more hotlinking will take place and I could be spending around $200 or more a month just from the bandwidth theft alone.

 

I know, I'm not asking about that now, I'm now asking about hotlinking instead and if google would be able to crawl and index the images for their image search if I use hotlink protection on them.

 

Set up your .htaccess file to allow Google to pull images for Google images, but ban all others. Here's what I do:

1. Upload all pictures to a directory called 'photos'
2. Put the following .htaccess file in that folder:

   
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?alloweddomain.tld(/)?.*$     [NC]

   Code (markup):
3. Add all domains that you woud like to allow to hotlink. You only have to put the top level domain in there. The code will allow any subdomain from that TLD to hotlink.
4. Add this code to your .htaccess and use a 'Don't steal my bandwidth image to discourage hotlinkers:

   RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ http://www.yourdomain.tld/hotlink.gif [R,NC]

   Code (markup):

Works like a charm ! PM me if you need any help with it.

Mike

 

Is your images in google images, yahoo images and msn images? Also, these are robots crawling the site to get the images so there is no browser activity involved. Another thing is will putting google.com as the allow domain work. Would .htaccess see google.com or would it see another domain when google is crawling my site. For example. They could use a different domain like I belive yahoo uses the robot intomic.com or something along them lines.

So what would I need to allow for google, yahoo, msn, askjeeves and the other main search engines and image searches?

I hope you understand what I mean. Personally I have a feeling that I could use hotlink prevention and all the major search engines will still be able to crawl, link to and show my images in their search engines as they are not displaying my image, but are taking a thumbnail from my pages and they will be able to see that image because it is on my site and not another site.

Can anybody confirm if I am right or not?

 

inktomi is a google name I beleive. What I was describing was hotlinking. Hotlinking and crawling is different. To prevent a bot from crawling a directory, exclude it in your robots.txt file. To prevent hotlinking (even from Google) use the .htaccess file.

If you don't use your robots.txt file to prevent google from crawling your site, then it can still cache your images and show them that way. But, if you're preventing them from hotlinking your images using the .htaccess file, then they can't show it.

So yes, if you use hotlink prevention with .htaccess, then all SE's will be able to crawl your site. I know because my site ranks in the top ten in a very competitive babe search phrase.

Mike

 

Sometimes you might want to use watermarks. If you can find the right code you can show the url of your site on top of all the images.

 

My main website was using 14 GB BW per month before using hotlink protection but not reduced to 6-7 GB after I activated that.!!! thats really make difference

 

Activate hotlink, or host images on an image-hosting site.

 

OK!

I have thumbnails created of the larger images, that is about 20 - 40 times smaller in size. So what I could do is hotlink the larger images and on each page where the larger image is, I could create some code that wraps my url around the thumbnail for that image or just do a link under the thumbnail image saying something like "click here to see the real size image" or "click here to see all of the image" or click here to see the image" etc.

So when people hotlink they will need the url to the larger image so people can actually see it proper. That will make people want to link to the larger image and they can't hotlink it as it will not work.

But does anybody know if Google gives lower rankings to smaller images. These images are about 60x60px's in size.

Anway, do you think allowing others to hotlink to the thumbnails and putting hotlink protection on the larger images is a good plan of action?