Sgt_Kickaxe - 11:03 pm on Jan 2, 2013 (gmt 0)

My image headaches began last month when Google wrongfully assigned 35-40% of my images to their explicit category and, of course, sites that scraped those very same images enjoy the family friendly filter.

It seems where Google is going wrong isn't with the image itself, its with the url to the image being on the other site. It's being treated like a mention or even a backlink and you know how much Google loves mashup sites, mashup outranks original sources quite readily for some sites much the same way framing your site onto another page with a few additional links pointing to it works.

The trick is to watermark and block hotlinking from day one.

Another effective technique is to block Google from hotlinking the images too. They will still index the images but will show a cached copy of the image instead of your image in hotlink and the scrapers can hotlink google cache images all they like, it won't affect you.