Here's the deal: my website offers a large number of full-size (1024*768) stock photos. At that size, they make good desktop wallpapers and also (here's the rub) good background images for blogs. There are a few bloggers who are consistently stealing my bandwidth by hotlinking to the image on my site. So far, I've turned a blind eye, but the bandwidth theft is getting so I can't ignore it any more. I'm tempted to move the images, breaking the links. I know this will disadvantage me when it comes to Image Search engines. My question is: are these links doing anything to help my pagerank? In other words, does it count as a link when one of these blogs links to one of my images, without linking to the page that it comes from?
