Sgt_Kickaxe - 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]