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Hot Linked?

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Buzliteyear

9:57 pm on Aug 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Is there a way that I can tell if something from my site has been hotlinked?

thanks.

goodroi

10:05 pm on Aug 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Welcome to Webmasterworld Buzliteyear,

You can look at the source code of your website. If it has an "a href" tag you are linking to something.

If you are trying to find inbound links to your webpage you can go to Yahoo or Google and type in "link:http://www.yoursite.com/yourpage.html". Recently, Google seems to be doing something to these link results.

jdMorgan

10:10 pm on Aug 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Buzliteyear,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Generally, you'll see that the resource has been fetched far more often than would be expected, and that the HTTP referrer indicates that it was referred by a site not your own. This information is available in your raw server logs and also in most 'stats' packages.

As an example, if your home page is requested 3,000 times per day, but an image on that page is requested 4,000 times per day, then that's unexpected, and the reason may be that the image has been hotlinked. So, you look at the log files and see that the image request referrer is www.yourdomain.com for 3,000 of the requests, and www.some_other_site for 1,000 more. Setting your browser security to maximum, you can visit the site and verify that your image is hotlinked.

Jim

Buzliteyear

2:20 am on Aug 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks guys, but I don't think I phrased my question correctly.

My bandwidth has taken a sudden jump, and I am concerned that some other site has taken pictures and put them on on theirs without re-saving them to their own server.

Is there a way I can tell if someone is doing that? And please, if you can, explain in baby terms as I am an amateur.

Thanks.

GaryK

5:54 am on Aug 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The answer to your question is in the last paragraph of jdMorgan's reply #3.

But let's start with something simpler. I've seen you posting in the newbie section so I know you're still very new to this.

Do you have access to your raw web server log files? Do you know what log files are?