Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
I’m not fooling with referrers - other people are. There are legitimate requests coming in that do not pass referrer data (or pass it as “-”). How do you make sure you don’t mess up those people’s experience?
I’ve done some REALLY complicated stuff with mod_rewrite over the years. I’m pretty good with knowing it’s limitations.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
If you can explain a legitimate request that would potentially effect what you’re wanting to accomplish I’m sure we can compensate for it.
BUT… if you’re that experienced with mod_rewrite then simply implement phpThumb on your server and bingo. .htaccess + phpThumb will accomplish exactly what fanshare has done with very little work.
I just don’t see why a blog would need to worry about referrers for hotlinking issues… a paysite, sure… but a blog…
Anyways, good luck to you 
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
OK, let’s talk code… Here’s my existing hotlinking code (that’s in a .htaccess file in my images folder)…
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !rawtop\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !wilywilly\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !realmenarehot\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !twistedpig\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !hotnakedmuscle\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !hotmaleasses\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !amateurgayteenvideo\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !boyperfect\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !machoscalientes\.es [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !cumsuckingpigs\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !maleprime\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !guysdouching\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !dirtidarlene\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !breedingzone\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !gaypornpics\.mobi [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !gaypornvideos\.mobi [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !justusboys\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !mail\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !\.mail [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !translate [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png|flv|mpg|m4v)$ /resources/stolen.jpg [L]
</IfModule>
So basically what that says is
If…
But Google Images doesn’t pass a referrer in Chrome or Firefox, so it meets the first case of that if statement. And if you remove the first case you’ll mess up a lot of legit web surfers.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
[QUOTE=britton;128981]If you can explain a legitimate request that would potentially effect what you’re wanting to accomplish I’m sure we can compensate for it.
BUT… if you’re that experienced with mod_rewrite then simply implement phpThumb on your server and bingo. .htaccess + phpThumb will accomplish exactly what fanshare has done with very little work.[/QUOTE]
So in the example above, instead of serving a warning image, I could envoke a script that serves (or creates & serves) a watermarked image. But if GI isn’t passing referrer how do I know my solution will work consistently and not mess up the UX of legit users who aren’t passing referrer data?
What do referrers have to do with it?
Why does an affiliate worry about hotlinking? Because we pay bandwidth bills. Imagine if someone set up a scraper site. They pay serving the HTML, I pay for the images. They make all the money, and I pay 90% of the hosting charges.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
Yes. You would simply redirect outside image requests to the script instead of the static stolen image.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;128983]
What do referrers have to do with it?
Why does an affiliate worry about hotlinking? Because we pay bandwidth bills. Imagine if someone set up a scraper site. They pay serving the HTML, I pay for the images. They make all the money, and I pay 90% of the hosting charges.[/QUOTE]
This is a moot point since you’re replacing the image with a watermarked version of itself. Who wants to serve a half visible/set width image that has your watermark tiled all over it saying the user should click view original image?
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
So far, I like the approach listed here the best…
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/new-google-images-and-traffic.2630989/page-4#post-18434192
That solution uses a cookie-based approach. So if the surfer doesn’t send the proper cookie they get a watermarked image. And watermarked images get created on the fly and only have to be created once.
What it doesn’t do properly is handle direct viewing of the image properly. In other words if they click “View original image” they won’t go to the page. And if they click on the image in Bing/Yahoo image search it’s the same issue.
I’m actually in the middle of building a gallery site. I’ll take all this into consideration on that site (I just happen to have already built it in a way where I can tell the page URL from the image URL), but for my blogs I think the solution above is about the best that can be done.
I’ll also block bingbot & bingbot-media from the image files on my blogs using robots.txt. #1 - Bing/Yahoo doesn’t send enough traffic to be worth it, and #2 the fact that clicks on the image don’t take you to the page means there’s no way to make it work on a site where you don’t know the page URL from the image URL.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
No. The current “stolen image” warning image is MUCH smaller than my full-sized images. And I could put the equivalent of an ad in the image - meaning if I got picked up by another scraper site then I could generate some direct traffic to my site. It’s the same reason why so many sponsors don’t care if tubes rip off watermarked promo videos - the watermark gets people back to the sponsor.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
[QUOTE=rawTOP;128982]
But Google Images doesn’t pass a referrer in Chrome or Firefox, so it meets the first case of that if statement. And if you remove the first case you’ll mess up a lot of legit web surfers.[/QUOTE]
I’m guessing FanShare doesn’t have this condition RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ in their .htaccess file for images hosted on their server hence they have two different versions of all their images. The ones on their server have a ZERO hot linking policy meaning if they can’t get referrer information from you then your getting a watermarked image. Then the ones on the CDN which are hidden from Google which I think you can hot link to with no problems. I haven’t tested that out.
I’m also guessing when Google sends out (Googlebot-Image) to actually pull the images from the site to make thumbnails for their search results FanShare serves them up the original image so there is a nice thumbnail. Another entry in mod_rewrite would allow Googlebot-Image access to this.
Sincerely,
Kevin.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
[QUOTE=mountequinox;128994]I’m guessing FanShare doesn’t have this condition RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ in their .htaccess file for images hosted on their server hence they have two different versions of all their images. The ones on their server have a ZERO hot linking policy meaning if they can’t get referrer information from you then your getting a watermarked image. Then the ones on the CDN which are hidden from Google which I think you can hot link to with no problems. I haven’t tested that out.
I’m also guessing when Google sends out (Googlebot-Image) to actually pull the images from the site to make thumbnails for their search results FanShare serves them up the original image so there is a nice thumbnail. Another entry in mod_rewrite would allow Googlebot-Image access to this.[/QUOTE]
Right, that about sums it up. They’re doing cloaking. Give a different URL to googlebot and then see who uses it. No need to check referrers.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
Then why not do the same thing as them in reverse?
1 Create a sub domain to use as your CDN. For example http://cdn.example.com/
2 Under that CDN set the following mod_rewrite rules
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(bot|crawler|spider|slurp|pinterest|facebook|feedfetcher) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www\.example\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.(gif|jpg|png|flv|mpg|m4v)$ /script.php?image=/real-path/$1.$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.(gif|jpg|png|flv|mpg|m4v)$ /real-path/$1.$2 [L]
You can watermark the images on the fly by a GD-supported PHP script as referenced here https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/new-google-images-and-traffic.2630989/page-4#post-18434192. I called this script script.php in the above rewrite rule.
3 On your main site you have two options to get these new URLs indexed.
A. Update your scripts to detect bots and have it rewrite the image URLs to the CDN URLs. Just like FanShare except in reverse.
or
B. Using mod_rewrite check user agents and if it’s a bot requesting an image do a 301 redirect to the CDN. I’m not sure how effective this second option will be but based on this article it appears to me a 301 redirect tells them not to use the original URL: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (bot|crawler|spider|slurp|pinterest|facebook|feedfetcher) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.(gif|jpg|png|flv|mpg|m4v)$ http://cdn.example.com/$1.$2 [R=301,NC,L]
I think the above would alleviate the problem by migrating all the bots information over to the CDN. This will allow you to keep your current mod_rewrite rules in place on your main site due to legitimate traffic linking to your root site now.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
PS. I haven’t tested these mod_rewrite conditions. I’m just providing them to give you the basic idea.
PSS. If you implement the above this will only do two things. Provide bots with access to the real images at the CDN URL for (for thumbnail creation) and provide visitors of those bots sites with watermarked images. If you want to redirect those visitors from the watermarked image to the actual page the image is on it gets a little more complicated but not to much.
This will only work if you have referrer information. It’s not 100% full proof but it will capture a pretty decent sized amount of traffic and redirect to the page you want. Those it doesn’t catch get nothing more than the watermarked image which I would assume would have your URL on it
It will require more mod_rewrite rules under the CND that watch the RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}. For example if someone clicks on the link to view an image within a Google search your server will see this tag “source=images” within the referrer. Once you have that info you pass the image requested off to a script that searches your database for the image and returns the page containing that image instead of the image.
I can get into Step #2 in more detail if you want to get that advanced.
Hope this has helped.
Sincerely,
Kevin.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
[QUOTE=mountequinox;129002]A. Update your scripts to detect bots and have it rewrite the image URLs to the CDN URLs. Just like FanShare except in reverse.
or
B. Using mod_rewrite check user agents and if it’s a bot requesting an image do a 301 redirect to the CDN. I’m not sure how effective this second option will be but based on this article it appears to me a 301 redirect tells them not to use the original URL: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633[/QUOTE]
The issue with a 2nd URL solution is it’s difficult to deploy in Wordpress. I’m not THAT good when it comes to programming. I’ve been meaning to get into WP functions and plugins, but I’m not there yet.
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
Any idea about an script to make a tour that display images like google images?
Re: Is Google Images Worth It Anymore?
How about using the search function built into Word Press? This option will only work if you have referrer information but I think it’s better than nothing. I know when I use Google I don’t use https so I’m guessing a lot of other people don’t either? I see tons of Google referrers in my log files. Plus even if I do use https when searching Google usually the outbound links link to Google via http and then to the destination website so you can capture a referrer. I’m assuming they do it this way so their own analytics program on the destination site can keep track of the inbound traffic they are sending.
The example below is only based on Google’s Image search results. You will need to adjust accordingly for the other search engines.
Within Google Image search links to “Visit Page” Look like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=UrdNfSp-Sb59CM&tbnid=5hx7a97ivdH_RM:&ved=0CAEQjxw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawtop.com%2Fporn%2F2008-05%2Fharry-forman-fucks-two-young-twinks&ei=eZ0cUY25E5CC9gTfz4GoCg&psig=AFQjCNES4T3z5mJk4lmmDkJi1s4viZ5lwA&ust=1360916211047718
Links to "View Original Image look like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=UrdNfSp-Sb59CM&tbnid=5hx7a97ivdH_RM:&ved=0CAIQjBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawtop.com%2Fgraphics%2Fchilloutboys.com%2Fharry-forman-fucks-two-young-twinks%2F08.jpg&ei=eZ0cUY25E5CC9gTfz4GoCg&psig=AFQjCNES4T3z5mJk4lmmDkJi1s4viZ5lwA&ust=1360916211047718
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .(gif|jpg)&
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} &source=images& [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /?s=$1 [R=302,NC,L]
*Not tested. Provided as an example.
This should catch any people trying to view via an image linked directly from Google and redirect them to Word Press’s internal search function which will take that image URL and search for it within post_content.
I used your site in this example:
/?s=$1 should equal = http://www.rawtop.com/porn/?s=http://www.rawtop.com/graphics/chilloutboys.com/harry-forman-fucks-two-young-twinks/08.jpg
Your word press setup gives me a link to click to reach the original post containing the image: Harry Forman Fucks Two Young Twinks @ ChilloutBoys.com
Mine gives me the actual post instead with images and all. Not sure what is causing the difference between the two? I’m guessing you have your search function set up different than I do.
This shouldn’t effect Google Crawling your site or images embedded within Google’s Image results pages seeing as they shouldn’t meet all three conditions within the mod_rewrite. The only thing this should effect is clicks to view the actual image.
Maybe this will help?
Sincerely,
Kevin.
