ytswy - 11:35 am on Jun 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

However, if hotlinking to your domain is causing a problem in Google Image Search (and we are not 100% sure that is the case) then redirecting, substituting images, denying access -- none of that would change the fact that there's a link out there, pointing to your site that Google can spider.

Cloaking however would I think - have 2 sets of identical images, one for Google and one for everyone else; these are not cloaked and have separate urls. You then have 2 sets of pages, 1 for Google and 1 for everyone else; these are cloaked and you serve whichever to your visitors depending on whether you think they are Google or not.

If you serve Google's spiders pages which reference images that are never shown to human visitors, this would get around the problem as I understand it.

As far as Google is concerned the clean images are only ever referenced from your own domain. Hotlinkers would be referencing images which would exist if Google queried them directly, but would not be the ones that Google sees on your site.

A visitor would see the google image when viewing it on Google Images, but get the human version if they clicked through to the page.

If hotlinking is the problem of course, and assuming that the hotlinkers are getting the image url from your site directly and not using Google Image search themselves.