Google Images - Ten times higher referals than regular search

[buksida]

Not sure whether this is normal or not, one of the sites I manage is a year old site that just emerged from the sandbox and is now doing quite well.

However my stats reveal that referals from Google image search is almost ten times higher than regular search referals. Is there any reason for this and anything that can be done to tip the balance in the other direction?

[percentages]

>Whether the traffic "converts" is only a concern if you are in the small minority of websites that are actually selling something.

"Small minority"?

It seems like the vast majority of sites I visit are selling something, even this one sells ads.

I actually can't remember the last site I visited that has "absolutely no commercial value". Usually there are Ads, sponsors, affiliates, link exchanges or something of some value.

Therefore I conclude that almost everyone is in the business of converting traffic to some kind of reward, not always ecommerce, but, never-the-less, some type of financial reward.

[phantombookman]

The only coversion I see from my 'images' traffic is to see my pictures converted into hot linked images on blogs!

[Gimp]

I handle hot linking very easily. I change the image title on my site. And then I replace the original image on the server that is being hot linked to a hardcore porn image or a picture of a man in full erection. It is amazing how fast the links disappear.

Another person who has problems with Pakistanis linking to his products from his regular sites replaces the images with cartoons.

[RockyB]

I use a charming little image of, as one unfortunate hotlinkee put it:

Dude jerking it with a dildo attached to a reciprocating saw shoved up his ass....

Ah, you've gotta love some of the responses when they realise.

Anyway, for blocking using .htaccess I use this in my file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([^.]+\.)?yoursite\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([^.]+\.)?site1\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([^.]+\.)?site2\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!^http://([^.]+\.)?site3\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/hotlink\.jpg$
RewriteRule \.(gif¦jpg¦png)$ /hotlink.jpg [NC,L]

That should redirect all hotlinkers to whatever (prefereably very small sized) image you want. I DO however also use these lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}!search\?q=cache [NC]

Which allow google to hotlink my images, and hence show up in image searches.

[edited by: RockyB at 2:56 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2006]

[caran1]

Does having a lot of graphic and image files affect spidering of a website in any way? Are the remaining HTML files in the website not spidered by googlebot or excluded from the index? I have a flat file structure.

[trinorthlighting]

Keep in mind that a lot of people who blog also post links. I get a lot of bloggers who convert to puchases. If its not killing your bandwidth or causing any extra expense then why potentially block a sale?

[Gimp]

The hotlinks are to images and with no link back to our sites. We get no sales.

[RockyB]

Yup, that's exactly what I get. Most of them from people using the image as a background for a MySpace or Xanga profile. It's running into almost 2 Gigabytes a week being hotlinked; not much for some, but a lot for my size site.

Btw, you need to change the ¦ character to a full bar if you want to use that code, webmasterworld puts a break in it for some reason.