Does Image Hot Link Protection Ruin Image SERPs?

[HuskyPup]

I have had hot link protection for quite some time however since the introduction of Google Instant I have noticed this past week the removal by Google of nearly all my images from their image SERPs.

I was thinking that something else may be at work, a Google glitch etc, however after going through loads of data today it suddenly became evident that my image referrals had fallen dramatically.

Does anyone know if my assumption may be correct and if so am I now faced with the option of either:

1. Accepting this huge reduction in traffic by retaining protection?

2. Allowing all this hotlinking just to get my image traffic and therefore AdSense earnings back?

Or does anyone have any other advice for what may be done?

Or am I barking up totally the wrong tree?

[HuskyPup]

Last night at midnight local time I started an experiment to see if I can get these images back into the SERPs and at the same time stop the hotlinkers and bandwidth stealers.

Using CPanel's AwStats "Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) - Full list" it's possible to see the domain linking to you and if you already have some names enabled in CPanel's IP Deny Manager in "Security", go to AwStats 404 and you will see all the domains you have denied.

All the 404 domains I did not have in my IP Deny list I have now added. The good thing about this is concentrate on the most problematic domain and deny as many IPs as you can then when you go to do another site all the names are already listed, the only pain is that you have to add them manually one at a time, but hey, it only takes a few minutes for each site.

I did about 20 sites last night and disabled hotlink protection on each of them.

I'll see what transpires over the next few days and keep you informed, if it goes ballistic before then it's easy enough to enable Hotlink Protection again.

[suratmedia]

In reply to link I posted before,

I got my two sites back to "safe image search" (within a month) by passing them to "google image search team" for review.

[HuskyPup]

I'll see what transpires over the next few days and keep you informed, if it goes ballistic before then it's easy enough to enable Hotlink Protection again.

Oh well, nearly 42 hours into this experiment and I am enabling Hotlink Protection again.

The IP Deny list does not stop hotlinkers!