Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
1)How do you effectively prevent hotlinking without disabling your own images to be found by google images?
2)Why is that site ranking for that photo instead mine?
2) Confusion can happen, because your image is in the other page's code. Not an easy problem to sort out, since many sites do use a different domain to serve images.
Hotlink protection will stop the image from appearing on a hotlinking site, but clueless hotlinkers with the image already in their browser cache may not notice that it doesn't display for other visitors and thus keep the hotlinked image on their site, and image ranking thieves seeking the traffic from a #1 ranking image don't seem to care if it displays on their site or not.
Hotlink protection will stop the image from appearing on a hotlinking site, but clueless hotlinkers
It's fine to me if at least I stop other's sites to display my images.
Would you mind to show me the code to achieve that?
2) So hotlinking other site's image is not a deceptive practice for Google? Mmmm they show it in their image search result's, do they aprove and even reward hotlinking?
As said, many sites hotlinking my images rank better than my own. Is that acceptable to Google or Black hat SEO?
Should I start hotlinking everybody's images as safe practice?
#2) it probably has a higher PR or is a more trusted domain! I run a university website with limited BW and memory, so I upload my images and files to my own server's image folder (with no index page) and hotlink the images and files.
The .edu website shows up of course on the google image search!
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦bmp¦png)$ - [F,NC]I get tons and tons of 403 errors coming from
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.example.com/picture.jpg
&imgrefurl=http://www.example.com/page.htm&h=768&w=1024&sz=68&tbnid=bs_KHEpM23Y06M:&tbnh=113&tbnw=150&hl=en
&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmarge%2Bsimpson%2B%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive&frame=smallHowever if I paste the above string in browser I can see my image on google search fine...
Many questions:
1) Is my hotlinking protection working?
2) Are those 403 normal?
3) Is that affecting in any way to google image search that I want to preserve and be available to show my images there?
[edited by: encyclo at 10:59 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2008]
[edit reason] delinked example URL and fixed sidescroll [/edit]
I've no idea why you don't see the same effect, unless you have referrers turned off, or I've totally misunderstood what you're saying ;)
I checked my anit-hotlinking code:
#anti-hotlinking
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif¦jpg¦jpeg¦bmp¦png)$ - [F,NC]
And according to this checker is preventing hotlinking to ocurr: htmlbasix (website) /disablehotlinking.shtml
I see a red X what means nobody can hotlink my images.
What I want is everybody sees my images in google search, but nobody hotlink my images from other sites. I'm a bit confused about the meaning of those 403. Is that what is suppoused to happen?
Add a line in that code for (images\.)?google\.com in the exact same way that you already added one for (www\.)?example\.com above.
When people view the Google cache you are currently blocking them (as their browser sends the referrer as google.com then).
When people view the Google cache you are currently blocking them (as their browser sends the referrer as google.com then).
Unfortunately, the referrer will always be the page in the bottom frame of google's image search results. Google is only referrer to that page, not to the images on that page. So, if hotlinked sites show up, visitors will not be able to view the images.
If your own site shows up, the results page will work fine, since the referrer will be your site.
May you please confirm that this is what you say?
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(images\.)?google\.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
1)Is that code correct?
2) Will that "allow" google images as I do with my own site?
3) Will that work for every google images (.com.br .es and so on? Or should I put something like this instead:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(images\.)?google\.*(/)?.*$ [NC]
My still unanswered questions are:
1) Every 403 I see is a blocked image request, and means user did not see my image in Google search? (Because I paste the url in 403 error and DO see it
2)
So If I put this code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(images\.)?google\.*(/)?.*$ [NC]
I'll let anybody see my images shown in either top frame or bottom frame in Google search (that's what I'm trying to achieve, in fact I want all google images and yahoo and msn images do that, and block sites showing my images by hotlinking)
I need to allow: all googles images, msn images, yahoo, images and my own site. And block all the rest.
Is that syntax correct?
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(images\.)?google\.com(/)?.*$ [NC]
4) If so how do I allow yahoo images and msn images, since in Yahoo case search looks like this:
[ar.images.search.yahoo.com...]
[es.images.search.yahoo.com...]
and so on
And MSN: [search.live.com...]
Every 403 I see is a blocked image request
Yes. If the referrer is Google images, then it's likely peole clicking the 'See full-size image' link at the top of results.
I'll let anybody see my images shown in either top frame or bottom frame in Google search
No: it will stop errors for those clicking 'see full size image'. The bottom frame shows a site hotlinking images. Anti-hotlinking will do as it's told and prevent these from showing, however you may write your mod_rewrite rules.
You can adapt your rule for other image search engines, however I don't know exactly how their systems work, so your mileage may vary.
