In the past year or so I found in my logs that several forums and blogs regularly hotlink to the pictures and movies on my free sites. I decided to put a stop on it, and inserted a .htaccess code that gives them a funny picture instead of the pic they wanted to hotlink.
But, is that good practice both in terms of SEO and popularity of your freesite hub?
I see that Google Images has no problem displaying pictures from my free sites even now when hotlinking is disabled. However, some other search engines are not so smart (e.g. MSN).
Do you think it helps or hurts your sales if people hotlink to your freesites? I think it’s probably not good to allow hotlinking because the hotlinkers don’t use your text with your linking code, just the bare picture. So you don’t get credit for any sales that may result from people seeing your hotlinked pictures or videos.
The only positive thing I see about hotlinking is that someone liked your choice of pics :D. There is also a remote possibility that the more tech savvy surfers will take a loog at the source of the hotlinked picture on the forum and eventually visit your freesite, but is that realistic to expect?
Google Images is displaying thumbnails that are located on their own servers. Then when you click the thumbnail they frame the page on your site, so it’s not hotlinking since the referrer for the image is the page on your site.
IMHO, hotlinking is bad unless it’s your URL that’s mentioned in the watermark…
And as far as I know there’s no SEO advantage to your site of another site hotlinking your images.
Thanks RawTop. I didn’t know exactly how Google displayed images search results. It’s smart of them.
MSN Live search displays image results in a different way, hence problems with the hotlinking protection.
In any case, I will leave the hotlinking protection.
I block them on my sites, but allow Google, Yahoo etc access to the images. Can easily be setup with htacess.
I did first wonder if it was good or not… but as Rawtop mentioned unless they show your URL / link them up to your site properly and give credit for it, it has no value at all to you.
