I've been noticing that many people have been using one of my images on their website. Instead of just right clicking, saving and uploading the image themselves many just keep it on my server. Now..my question: Do you think (even though it's not an inlink) Google and the others count that as something? I'm not sure if I should be po'd or flattered?
I had the same thing happen to one of my images. It never showed as a back link to my site from Google webmaster tools or Yahoo so I edited the image and put the URL of my site on it. It didn't take long for the people stealing my image (and burning my bandwidth) with no apparent benefit to my site to stop.
That is called hot linking. There are many examples of people whose images were hotlinked replacing the image in question with some obnoxiously disgusting porn picture. I have never done that, but I did implement a hotlink blocking rewrite rule in apache. To my amazement, I had the person who hotlinked my picture (and stealing my image and bandwidth) sending my nasty emails about suing me for ruining her site by taking down an image, and demanding that I put it back up. Lately, I have just been adding URLs to the images when I find them hotlinked.