Blocking A Google Image Referral

[HuskyPup]

I am getting an inordinate amount of Google linked image referrals as per:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://example.com/keyword/keyword/images/keyword.jpg&imgrefurl=http://eample.com/keyword/keyword/keyword.html

I do not want to remove the image from search just stop these sites from referring this image and url.

I have the image protected yet these template sites for myspace and such like show my image in their results since they are showing Google results when people search for these images on those sites.

Bear in mind I am the top result from 440 million therefore you can probably understand the volume of referrals I am getting and is this screwing-up my metrics big time since every time one of these referrals come through it triggers my logs AND Google AdSense!

Any ideas if anything can be done other than removing the image altogether?

[edited by: tedster at 2:49 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2010]
[edit reason] I de-linked the example url [/edit]

[Seb7]

I'm sure someone has already got a solution to this as I've seen referred images on myspace.

My approach:
1) Make all images within your website available only via a script.
2) Create a session value if any of your pages are requested.
3) Create the image script to only display the image if one of your pages has been opened (by testing the session value), or if the referral URL is blank, matches your website or matches Google.

Accepting a blank referral URL would be required as to still get indexed by Google.

This would stop images displaying if referred from anonymous website, and would make sure they do display otherwise.

If fact, I wouldnt block the display of image, but replace it with a notice.

[HuskyPup]

The problem I seem to be having is that the images are being shown like a minature Google image aeRXH, the user then clicks the image they like and it is shown as their background however in my case a notice by, coolchaser is the worst offender, states that the image is not available.

All well and good however this coolchaser request is generating a log viewing and an AdSense page impression as well, insofar as my logs are concerned I have that nailed down to a 302 redirect to Google:-)

So far this month one image alone has had 15,000+ redirects.

[dstiles]

Possible high-theft image hits I've seen over the years include images being used as "avatars" or similar in popular forums, "about this site" web sites and a tool I forget the name of which displays dozens of images linked to through altavista on a web page.