Ok let me see here if I can explain this correctly. What I have an issue with is people linking to say mysite.com/images/image.png on their website which, provides me with nothing but bandwidth usage. What I would like is to have that mysite.com/images/image.png link when directly called in the browser to redirect the user to the homepage of the site so I can convert that view into a page impression. Now the site is using wordpress too not sure if that helps or not. Also, if something like this were to be used would it have any impact, good or bad on my SE rankings as the site holds quite a few #1 positions on google? How would I go about this? Also have another site that is pure html but has the same issue but has been around for 11 years lol I'm afraid to touch it as it does pretty well but I lose thousands of impressions a day from the same inbound linking issue. Thanks in advance guys
There is no way to have the browser redirect the visitor of another domain, that all is doing embeds your image into their site, to your site instead. You can of course have them redirected to another image, when your images are linked from another domain, which will lead that other image to be shown on the other domain instead of the linked image. You can use that to point out that the image is stolen or to advertise as graphic your domain or whatever else you can show in an image. Search in Google for "image hotlinking prevention" or "hotlinking protection" or similar keywords. You will find a lot of solutions.