HuskyPup - 9:47 am on Oct 11, 2010 (gmt 0)

I redirect hotlinked images back to the article

How?

For a few images that would not be a problem for me yet my thousands of images it would be a pain.

Any similarities to this on your end?

All I have used is cpanel's hotlink protection.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google. [NC]

Thanks, I'll try that.

So, hotlink or not hotlink, Google is just juggling with the results on Google Images.

After spending most of the weekend looking at this I have also noticed that most of my competitors' images are also missing and I know many of those have hotlink protection as well.

And yes, I am also seeing my copied images all over the SERPs!

I'm not 12 hours into my experiment yet, I have disabled hotlink protection from 10 sites with various country ccTLDs. They're not big sites yet they all ranked extremely well for images and if they bounce back there will be a noticeable statistical jump.

I have also checked Bing and it would seem that they too have removed most of my images!