Any benefit to me SEO-wise from outside sites embedding my images?

[bobbonew]

I noticed that slowly over time more and more sites are embedding images from my website they find in Google images. For example:

<img src="http://mydomain.com/myimage.jpg">

I have never had a real problem with this as bandwith is pretty cheap. But are there any SEO benefits from me letting this continue? I know when sites link to mine its a benefit, so what about them using my images on their site?

[chrisv1963]

No, there are no benefits. Actually, it can cost you traffic. When I checked Google Images yesterday I saw one of my images, BUT when I clicked on it I was directed to a blog and not to my own website. What happened is that the blog hotlinked (embedded) my image and was ranking in Google Images for the hotlinked image.

[ken_b]

I hope you are visibly labeling your images with your domain name so you at least get some free advertising out of the deal.

[outland88]

Yep, you better be checking if you have images appearing in Google search. Could be hot-linkers easily siphoning your traffic. Seemingly a fresher usage of the image in Google bumps the original.

[netmeg]

Image hotlinking has been a HUGE bandwidth issue for some of my ecommerce clients before I started getting creative with .htaccess.

[Planet13]

Image hotlinking has been a HUGE bandwidth issue for some of my ecommerce clients before I started getting creative with .htaccess

Could you please elaborate?

I found that content farm site that starts with an m and ends with an o and is a word in Hawaiian hot links to the google images, which of course are "hot linked" from google.

So I would love to block macrapo with out blocking google.

[yandr]

You can use URL rewrites to replace the hotlinked images with an image you will specify yourself, which could be a simpe ad for your site. Search for "hotlinking url rewrite" or "anti-leech" and you will find plenty of information.

[chrisv1963]

You can use URL rewrites to replace the hotlinked images with an image you will specify yourself, which could be a simpe ad for your site. Search for "hotlinking url rewrite" or "anti-leech" and you will find plenty of information.

What will happen to your images in Google Image Search when you do this?

[yandr]

I take it you are asking if they will get dropped from the first pages.

I don't really know, but I doubt it will make a difference. The images are not really linked as they are today. They are 'embedded' in 'foreign' webpages. They are not 'your' images anymore.

Without a doubt, I would 'panish' them.

[HuskyPup]

My torrid time with hotlinkers and then clamping down too heavily and denying almost everything to SEs have seen several threads, this is the htaccess code I am now using seemingly with very good results.

At the worst I had one image baing called on over 200,000 times a month, that was bandwidth costing me money for someone else's vanity simply because they were too lazy to host it themselves.

RewriteEngine on
AddType text/html .html
AddHandler server-parsed .html
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes

<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
deny from 000.000.000.000

In here I have about 15 IP addresses of the worst picture grabbers

allow from all
</Limit>

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^google\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^bing\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^yahoo\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ /images/hotlink\.$1 [L]

[netmeg]

What HP said.

Also, I (for the most part) don't have a problem blocking images from Google too. We don't get any traffic from Google Images that does us any good.