Just a quick question. I'm building a website that uses lots of images. Is it worth preventing hotlinking? If I do prevent hotlinking, will images still be indexed in Google? Also, not preventing hotlinking, does it come with any SEO benefits? If I allowed hotlinking, also what happens in terms of who gets credit for the image? Could there be any disadvantages with duplicate content? Thanks.
Google Images won't index your images if you prevent hot linking. Personally, I wouldn't bother blocking hot linking, but brand every one of my images instead. This way, anytime someone decides to hot link one of my images, it's advertising for me. Additionally, you'll get traffic from Google Image searches.
I was reading a post on an SEO blog and the author mentioned that it is an extremely good way of generating traffic/promotion. He said that if you put a few popular images up, they get indexed in Google and people hotlink to them, if you set up a new website, put a redirect where the image is and you have instant exposure. It was in this blog here: http://www.bluehatseo.com/quick-answers-1-link-building/ What you have said is probably the best way forward, but a good proportion of the images on said website are thumbnails and I don't really want to ruin the UX for my visitors by having ugly text over images. It's not so much of a problem yet, but it's definitely something I need to think about for the future. I wouldn't so much mind if I had a backlink from it, but at the end of the day, hotlinking amounts to nothing short of bandwidth theft.
I don't recommend redirecting the image to your site, that would be like the old break frame technique, be careful before using it, make sure it's not against the terms.