Hotlink Protection Why? - You are losing revenue from Image searches!
Definition of Image Hotlink:
Image Hotlinking (also known as leeching, or inline linking) is the practice of stealing bandwidth from other websites, by linking to an image stored on another server. By doing this, when a person visits a website with hotlinked images, the images must be downloaded from the other server, costing that server bandwidth, instead of the server being visited. This practice can lead to gigabytes of bandwidth being “leeched” from other websites, with no benefit to themselves in return. [source]
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This definition only tells half the story. In 2009, who cares if somebody is riding your server and adding up bandwidth on your account. What servers today don’t offer unlimited bandwidth? Fact is most do. I will tell you why hotlink protection is important to you. The most important concern that you should have is when your images are being hotlinked, it is costing you visitors and money. How? Well read my story and you will begin to see the real issue.
Firstly, don’t underestimate the benefits and revenues that you can gain from having your images show up in Google image searches. If you run Google ads, vistors equals money. Your website should be getting traffic if you have an image that people want to view. How would you feel if your image was giving another website your traffic and your ad revenue? Without some type of hotlink protection, you are going to be frustrated. Trust me.
What is hotlink protection and why do I need it? Simple. Some other website links to your images, and uses your image url to show the image on their site. In other words, you (and Google Image Search) may think that your image is in the Google image results. Well your image may be in their results page, but your website is not! In fact, somebody elses website, the website that has hotlinked or stolen your image url will be the website shown in the Google image search results. Confused? This means the website stealing your image will be displayed as the source page for your image. Remember, when you click an image on a Google image search, then next page is a 2 frame page, with the original website page in the bottom half, and the image thumbnail in the top frame. How does it feel to see somebody elses website in the lower half of the search page when in fact it should be your website instead? Well, it sucks. So, think of it this way. If that other site has ads, they get the clicks. Afterall, they are the website shown in the bottom frame of the Google image results page. Hardly fair is it? Without hotlink protection, you will face this situation.
Here is some fuel to add to the fire. Google image seems to update once every month or couple months. I think of it like a magazine being released. A new issue comes out every month or so. So, if you aren’t there this issue, you will be waiting an awful long time for another chance. If you are like me, I’ve been shut out 2 consecutive times! Yes, my images were on that first page of results, but my website was not. Somebody else enjoyed the clicks and revenues from using my url and images. The answer? Hotlink protection. Well, so it seems. Let me explain.
If you are frustrated and angry like I am, then you have Googled around looking for hotlink protection. I did, and I know how ridiculous a lot of these fixes are. They may remedy a long term solution to hotlinking but do you want to lose out on a month or two of visitors? I certainly wasn’t satisfied.
My first solution was switching the image that would display. Pretty clever? Well, I made the image an ad for my site instead. Fine, but it’s not a link and most people aren’t going to bother writing down my website url and typing into their address bars. So the website stealing my image would not get the original image. In reality, they received the top three image results in Google image search thanks to me.
I decided to investigate a simple way to redirect traffic via .htaccess to my website instead of the image landing page. Make sense? The website stealing my image and image url would be now providing an active link to my original website page from where the image is from. Yes that thief would still be showing up in the bottom frame on Google image results pages, but if people click my thumbnail image on their site, or if they click the “see full size image” link in the top frame, they will be redirected to my website and page, not simply the image landing page. See, an image landing page gives me nothing. People don’t see my website or ads. Having said this, I did ask Google about doing this redirect.
More to come!
