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| Is it safe to block hotlinking when there is no referrer?
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Sgt_Kickaxe
msg:4541029 | 6:19 pm on Jan 31, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Google's new image search layout no longer sends a referrer when hotlinking your image, it used to. The result is that Google now shows your image hotlinked on their site instead of loading a cached copy on their own server.
This isn't ideal since scrapers generally grab the url of the image they are stealing and I'd much prefer they grab Google's cached url instead of my site's url.
Is it safe to go ahead and block images from displaying if there is no referrer? A blank referrer can happen in some situations such as when behind a company firewall.
I'm asking this from an SEO standpoint, not about code, but here is the htaccess that will be left if the blank referrer check is removed.
rewritecond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
rewriterule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [NC,F]
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indyank
msg:4543684 | 3:13 am on Feb 8, 2013 (gmt 0) |
in your case it is very simple. Use hotlink protection.
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matrix_jan
msg:4543705 | 3:49 am on Feb 8, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Not that simple. Google hotlinks through https. There is no referral data, which forces me to select who has the right to access directly to my images.
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indyank
msg:4543865 | 5:21 pm on Feb 8, 2013 (gmt 0) |
| which forces me to select who has the right to access directly to my images. |
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that is exactly what I meant.
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indyank
msg:4543866 | 5:26 pm on Feb 8, 2013 (gmt 0) |
As i understood it, you didn't want anyone to hotlink your images including google. So white-listing is the best option.
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kleverkode
msg:4545778 | 11:32 pm on Feb 14, 2013 (gmt 0) |
@matrix_jan very true. There is an interesting solution of sorts in stackoverflow [stackoverflow.com] but have not used it myself, looks like there is some kind of logic behind it, maybe more experts on the topic than me can check it out.
I lost more than 60% of my traffic with the new search, it's really crazy.
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lucy24
msg:4545792 | 1:16 am on Feb 15, 2013 (gmt 0) |
Ooh, that's kind of ingenious. It's based on going one step back from what most fixes use. You have to give g### image search a different file in the first place-- that is, a file with a different URL-- because that is the only sure way to tell if someone is looking at a search result. This part, of course, can't be done retroactively; you have to work it in slowly as they re-crawl your site.
There's one big risk though, and the post itself points it out:
| just like other solutions it's up to Google to inte[r]pret it as cloaking and ban at their will |
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So it will only work as long as the googlebot doesn't realize that nobody else is getting redirected. It has to be a redirect, not a rewrite, because the whole point is to create a different URL.*
Now, why is this part of the discussion here rather than in the ongoing Google-Image-Search thread?
* You could theoretically do it as a rewrite at the original URL-- but only if you had some supplementary php business that cross-checked the filesize down to the last byte to determine whether you're dealing with the real file or the search engine's version.
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