Heard bad things happening but surprised to find it happen with me I dont want to reveal any urls here, but will enumerate my experience so that others can keep a check on it OK now this did not happen with me on actual Web search results pages, but on image search results pages As you all might be aware, image search provides almost 30+% of google traffic. So placing lot of images in your site is a good idea, but be careful with copyright. What happened to me was i had one of my images rank very well for the keyword search in that niche and kind of gave me 500+ unique views from just one search term and adsense revenue of 10+$ from that one search term. Few weeks ago i suddenly found one fine morning that i no more ranked for that search term in image search, kept wondering why, whom to ask, an SEO myself thought of doing an extensive research, took me 2 days to identify what is the problem. It was nothing but SERP hijack by an authority site in that niche. They are big so they can do it, what they did is nothing but hotlinked it from my website, so google picked up the hotlink and for what reason (sigh) placed the image in results pages but with a link to the authority site, stating "find the original picture here", now that was surprising. I contacted the website and asked them to take down the picture and they have done it very quickly, even though it looks like it was not their intention to hijack SERPs i think this gives a reason to authority sites to suck out traffic from you and take it to their websites, dunno how google is going to stop it. I am still surprised how google could not analyse that the image was on my website for 3 years and suddenly they found this image belonged to someone else when they hotlinked it from my site, m assuming an algo error or something, well informed google also about it. Now what i did after that - knee jerk reaction, i changed the name, url everything of the image and placed it in my page which was ranking well, so how do i go about it, was it a good idea to do or should i do a permanent redirect from the old image url to the new one or should i leave it to age like this and then wait for G to act upon it. Got some ideas...let me know