@ silfiriel Right! @ ryan_uk Sorry not to have been able to convince you. Simply check ranking of some of your pictures before speaking about a possible ranking change. Speaking of possible ranking change here makes clear things confused.
That's fine. Revenue not yet dropping due to a "technical issue" is not something I want to be convinced of.
Hello, can you describe your way of hotlinking protection to me/us maybe? My Art Website sank from 3200 visitors before the update to now 1150 =/ Greets and a happy weekend
If, by chance, you are considering that google abuses its dominant position when "stealing" (hotlinking) your pictures, you should be aware that as for the European Commission in charge of competition regulations: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/antitrust_mail.html
So, did someone done the code properly to redirect the "view original image" to the host page of the image? + dynamic watermark? It works well for fansshare.com It would be great if someone post here the full code properly (that works also for wordpress platform).
I noticed this first from the user side when doing an image search before I noticed any changes in traffic. I know Google says they arrange everything around the ease of use for searchers but it also seems like they are arranging everything so most searchers end up on pages where Google makes money instead of webmasters. In the long term, although webmasters are the first ones inconvenienced by this, users won't like it either as they don't find what they are looking for.
Google should seriously revise this policy/design. I too have lost a huge chunk of traffic due to this design change.
There is a small site about the matter http://protect-your-image.com/ ..its not much but shas poll for webmasters. According to it, 15 of 40 webmasters lost over 60% of their traffic!
My hosting service offers this option to enable hotlink protection or disable it and redirection to any URL, although since I have to sites I redirect to "/" which is Home page. So it's not a platform thing like wordpress or Joomla or similar.
I am searching for it too. I will share here if I solve this but it's not as easy as it looks. Can you ask your hosting provider to help you redirect the images to the host page where they are placed? Redirect to the post, not to the homepage. And it will be good if we know to automatic watermark them with "click for full res".
there is a issue regarding hotlink protection and image ranking drop. I am using hotlink protection for last 1week no drop in ranking I suggest to all publishers if you activate hotlink protection , make sure that you give permission to Googlebot , to access your image directly. RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.MYDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.MYDOMAIN.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Image [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners-Google [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Mobile [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Video [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-News [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !msnbot [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !slurp [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Bingbot [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.MYDOMAIN.com/ [R,NC] this code may help you. kindly note that in http user agent you may allow all google bot by this code rather than individual. (though I prefer to do separate ) RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(Googlebot|Mediapartners)
Thanks its working with wordpress cms, but its redirecting to home page. Maybe you have some sugesstions how to redirect to post of photo? EDIT: its also blocked images on my web page.