referrals from Ebay?

eBay?

[skyshock21]

My traffic log report said I got the 2nd most number of referrals from Ebay. We certainly don't advertise with ebay, and I don't mention anything in my ebay profile about the site.

How/Why is this happening?

[john316]

Someone is probably hotlinking to one of your images.

[ytswy]

This is the bane of my logfile analysis (ok so I have a useless stats package).

If you are getting a huge number of referrals its likely to be just one person with one or a few very popular items, I've found.

There are a number of automated solutions to this (do a site search for "htaccess hotlinking"). If this is to much, changing the image they're linking to an image of a bit of text saying something like:

"Linking to other peoples' images is not only rude but stupid, since this person can change the image to anything they want.

"Next time it may say FREE FED-EX SHIPPING ON THIS ITEM"

Works wonders in my experience.

I generally email the person concerned and tell them what I've done - don't want to really annoy someone.

[cfx211]

A great way to figure out if image theft is happening is to run a traffic by referrer report that will list hits, pages, visits, and uniques by referring_url. When you get results for that report, divide pages/visits. If this number is less than 1 then someone is probably stealing images from your site.

[storevalley]

Must be a cute way of using mod_rewrite or similar to make sure that stolen images display suitably doctored versions ;)

[skyshock21]

Hmm... that must be it.

That idea of changing the image to FREE FED EX OVERNIGHT shipping would just RULE.

I'm going to do that.

[sun818]

A seller could have a link to your web site because of your content?

If they're hotlinking they're not likely to act on your request to remove the image. Revenge is wonderful - you can take as far as you want. I know one seller that replaced the image with porn then tattled to eBay to get the seller suspended. Its a bit much, but I do what ytswy says and just edit the image to say, "free Overnight shipping!" Remember though that your product images need to be pointed to a new image URL.