i recently have checked my latest visitors to my website and notice that the url at the bottom is coming up alot of times. I know this means that they are using google images but i do not know how they found it because that picture isn't in google images. I have seen this picture posted in forums using using the url to the picture on my site. But this wouldn't make sense coming from google images. Are all these views people who actually never see my site but counting in my site statistics as unique sites? I hope this makes sense http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.bluetomorrow.com/images/stories/ps3controller.jpg
Apparently Google has indexed the image: http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=ps3+controller+site%3Abluetomorrow.com So people could be finding it doing a search.
thank you...when i searched for it, i couldn't find it. So if they click on the picture they are actually seeing the webpage that it is found on? In the search string i have over 300 views from the term ps3 controller so i guess this is good? am i right?
oh there is definitely some hotlinking going on...i keep seeing many forums using the pic from my website and they are pulling it from my server. hopefully they actually see my page
If they are just hotlinking the picture (likely) then they aren't seeing the page unless the site is giving you credit or someone checking the properties of the image. I've had to deny IP access from some sites that were stealing too much bandwidth. I had someone using proxyURL to host an entire page, which was getting cached by google and gave me a duplicate content penalty for the page.
If they are hotlinking to an image that isn't important to your site, swap it for an advert for your site, and drive traffic to it
Yes. There was a recent thread about Yahoo pinching someone's image and they swapped out the graphic to replace it with one that had their own homepage url on (if I am remembering the story correctly).
At a rough guess I would say that they are in fact hotlinking to the google images image, and leving the hotlink from google to you in place (if that makes sense)