I have worked hard to rank first place with images for various searches on a secondary site. I was using this site as an experiment but it is also part of my business. If it worked well, I would translate the methods to my main site. Anyway, my methods worked very well and all of my images were indexed and many of them were number one in image search for various keywords and I was getting decent traffic for a brand new site. A few months ago, my server host (dreamhost) decided to move all of my sites to a new server. This completely messed up all of my sites and took them all offline for some reason. I didn't pay as much attention to my secondary site and didn't realize that the images portion of the site was down for probably a week and lost all ranking with google. Today I do a search and see my images are still number 1!! but I'm getting no traffic so I look again and see that someone has hotlinked my photos from their site and they are now getting all of the traffic. So, if you click the photo, you go to their site and not mine even though if I go to google images and search site:mysite.com my site is showing that it does have indexed images but they are all linking to other websites. So several websites are actually hot linking my images and stealing my traffic. How do I fix this? Please do not suggest putting a fake image or taking the images down and starting over. I want to keep everything the way it is. I just want google to send people who click the image to MY site and not to these stealers (remember they are hotlinking, not even hosting my images so I cannot understand why they would go to their site and not mine!)! Thank you!
You can fix this with htaccess Apache code. Do a google search for it. Even my Host, Hostgator has an automatic section where you can just click a button and its done but its better to do it yourself.
Or you can switch the image name and replace it in your site and the images won't work.....however.......if people hotlink your images its good for seo and does provide you traffic.
It doesn't provide you any traffic at all - it does the opposite. In essence they're stealing the images from your server - anybody seeing them has no idea they came from another website.
You can prevent that by using your cpanel. But it will increase your work, you will not able to use your images on other site.
No need to report to webmaster and all. You have the power. Control yourself. check your cPanel and use the tools of yours when you are paying for it. Its very easy and only meant for Hotlink protection then why not use it.
techreviews is right. There's a easy way to disable hotlinking. Alternatively, you can ask the webmaster who is hotlinking your image to give you the credits by adding a link to that page.
How did you come to discover that these sites or site is hotlinking your pictures and stealing traffic? I have never bothered to check for this. I see, you searched your image names, I'll try this.