htaccess and search engines

Can anti-hotlinking affect images in Google?

[janbeeu]

This may be a stupid question and I hope you won't hack me when it is :-)

If I stop hotlinking to my sites images in htaccess does this also result in ie Google Images not picking-up those images anymore? Quite some visitors of our site come from Google Image.

[jdMorgan]

jambeeu,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

> If I stop hotlinking to my sites images in htaccess does this also result in ie Google Images not picking-up those images anymore?

Yes and no, assuming you're talking about referrer-based anti-hotlinking code.

It won't affect Googlebot fetching the images and putting up thumbnails on the Google Image Search pages, because the Googlebot doesn't provide a referrer. So if you allow blank referrers --as you should-- then Gbot won't have a problem with this. However, if a potential visitor clicks on Google's "see full-size image" link, then the image request is sent to your server. The referrer, being images.google.com, would be subject to your referrer-based access controls.

The solution is to add images.google.com as a permissible hotlinker in your code.

Another aspect you might want to look at is, how do these visitors from Google Images convert? That is, if your site is commercial, do they buy much? Some webmasters report that conversions from G Images is very low, so you may not need to worry about this traffic anyway.

Jim

[janbeeu]

Jim,

They should put up a statue for you and if they don't, I'll send them a virus! (like the flu) This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you very much.

[janbeeu]

Update: I followed your advice Jim and.... it works perfectly fine. YAY! However, Google Image stil gets the full picture if they click on the ling but we don't mind as all are pictures have a clear watermark.

Thanks again Jim, they can put that stutue of yours on a high pedastole now :-)

[ianevans]

In [webmasterworld.com...] I summarised the help I received using setenvif to stop hotlinking. I also mention how I feed people clicking on direct links for images through a custom 403 that redirects them to a page that brings up the image in its context.

I just wanted a quick clarification on the behaviour of google images.

I currently have:
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://images\.google\..*(www\.)?mysite\.tld" good

From what I've read here and in other posts on this site,the Google image bot works off a blank referer so removing the above line would not affect it.

Would the framed "image in its original context" be affected, or is the referer in that case my site, so it still works?

Basically I'm thinking of removing the line to stop the "See full-size image." link and pass that through the custom 403 as well.

[jdMorgan]

Robots (the legitimate ones, anyaway) never provide a referrer, because they get URLs from their databases, and not from single Web pages. So there is no single HTTP referrer page as the term is defined.

Jim