McSpike - 12:50 pm on Jul 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

100% I had a huge problem a few months back with over 200,000+ requests per month for just three images. No one, absolutely no one clicked on anything

I mean CTR loss now with interface change vs. a month ago. Not CTR loss in general.

Why you had such a loss is because your images most probably came up for unrelated topic, normally not resulting in any clicks. And if hotlinking is a problem and you still want to show it in google while blocking the rest, you can do that in htaccess. You can show up a different image for the rest, for example a picture giving a finger, using small size image. The funny thing is the ones hotlinking will not notice a problem because they will have the old image in cache and will see everything fine while they will be giving their visitors a finger. But better yet, put the URL of your site on the image telling what they can get there. I have a ton of images for my sites done like that and they are displayed on a ton of blogs because they hotlink it, while they have no idea since they have the original image in their caches. Funny as hell.