Google Images' New (Bing-like) Layout

[levo]

Clicking on images now opens a layer with the larger image and a link to the page.

[img844.imageshack.us...]

[nicolass]

netmeg:

What you wanna say?! to ppl? "Hey guys who care for your 10 years of work...go get find another job"

Who are you to say ppl that then can put all their work al their spent years to put all in trash? Coz google is right (from your side).

Hple last dye so lets ppl to have hope...btw Im 100% shure that you don't have image websites...

[netmeg]

You're right about that, I don't have image websites, and it's a good thing. I never once said Google was right, I said they were inevitable.

You can do what you want. I sure don't care. But from a practical standpoint (and I am nothing if not a pragmatist) if your living depends on image traffic, it's time to develop an alternative or an add-on.

[gbk666]

Or a mix. I am lucky that my life does not depend on the websites i build up, but i worked on them, was super happy when i reached 500 people per day, 1000, 2000, 3200 last week. I saw a raising revenue which i used to pay the server costs and organized art contests. Websites are a hobby for me but one i am dedicated to..and like everyone i don't like it when someone else would make money with my work.

I look forward to change my website partially and also..hopefully see a solution via a script to prevent that google can hotlink the images.

I look even more forward to see google being sued and sooner or later getting down because they try to be too powerful

The Images, the weather service, the hotel services..one business niche after another is getting occupied by Google currently.

If there won't be found a good solution, i will watermark images with a big logo and a sentence like "visit example.com" to see the full version, and always place the fullsize images without watermarks below an image on my websites

what do you think about that?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:16 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] examplified domain [/edit]

[netmeg]

I think you should block them. Entirely. That's what I think.

[HuskyPup]

what do you think about that?

I've been watermarking all my new images for 18-24 months now, I haven't bothered doing all my older ones since they've been copied and scraped so many times. I remember leosghost telling me in the early 2000s to watermark them however I wasn't concerned since I ranked #1 for them all and because I was the original I naturally assumed that Google would always assign them that way...but oh no, G's got its knickers in such a twist this past 3-4 years, and especially so since Panda, I'm not taking anything for granted any more.

hopefully see a solution via a script to prevent that google can hotlink the images.

There will be those around here who will remember me screaming every day about one image alone being searched for and hotlinked 30,000 times a day! I eventually found the correct coding for htaccess and have not had a problem with hotlinking since.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that my main CMS image gallery is not having the larger images shown in the results, only the 400 x 300, which is fine by me since from this weekend I shall upload new large images to the server and then download the 400 x 300 and watermark them with something like "Low Resolution Image, Click To See Larger" and then that notice will be seen in the image SERPs and should encourage people to visit my site since they will then know something better is there...maybe:-)

Incidentally for WordPress users there is a great protection script already out there disabling not only hotlinking but also text copying and pasting!

[gbk666]

Thanks for your reply

In my case i have a problem,with watermarks. I am featuring artists..with their knowledge and written permission (yeah..i am one of the few guys who care fo something like that instead to copy without caring for the creator). I got the rights by the creators to upload their show their works, a few hundred were even made for my site as part of art projects but i guess not all artists would like the watermark idea. I ll see how they react if i explain them the matter.

My site with the images is wordpress based, can you say me which plugin you mean?

i tried "Hotlink Protection" "Configurable Hotlink Protection" "Hotlink2Watermark" and "WP Image Protect Lite" which did all not prevent the google image search but work with hotlinking from other websites

Anyway, happy weekend everyone!

[HuskyPup]

Hope this is ok mods?

I use both WP-Copyright-Protection and WP Automatic Hotlink Protection, both free and available through manage plug-ins.

[silfiriel]

@HuskyPup is WP copyright protection changes images and is Automatic Hotlink protection redirecting to home page or specific post?

[cattie]

Thanks to netmeg and HuskyPup for posting something useful in this thread.

I don't have a perfect solution yet and I am not waiting for someone else to solve it. It is my business so I'm responsible for its marketing. That is why I am already testing three different approaches and will keep testing and investing until I get it right.

[gbk666]

Heya, tried out the plugins

Automatic Hotlink protection adds parameters to the htaccess to prevent normal hotlinking, but it seems to not work with the google search ..the images are still there and hotlinked as before

WP copyright protection is more or less just a rightclick disabler on texts and images..good to prevent that the average joe is copying images or texts maybe but not too difficult to get rid of for people with a bit technical knowledge

both did not prevent the images to be hotlinked by google for me =/

anyway thanks still @HuskyPup

[levo]

I think there are three things you can do.

1. Blocking Googlebot and/or Googlebot-Images to your images.
- I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) images do effect ranking of page. I wouldn't recommend just blocking access to images via robots.txt or .htaccess

2. Hotlink protection
- Signed-in users and others using the https version doesn't send any referer. It won't work for those users. Also you're out of luck if you're using a CDN.

3. noindex images
- If you want your images out of Google's index, I recommend using X-Robots-Tag. It shouldn't effect ranking or Google Instant Preview.

<Files ~ "\.(png|jpe?g|gif)$">
 Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</Files>

more info on x-robots-tag: [developers.google.com...]

[gemeweb]

Does this WP copyright protection disable the rightclick on the images shown on google image search?

And did someone done the code for hotlink and watermark same as <snip>?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:28 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] no specifics [/edit]

[Play_Bach]

> The real problem is that google has to much power on the internet

OT: I was thinking about this driving into town today and wondered what would happen if Bing, Yahoo! simply quit the search biz as a strategic move. Would Google then have a monopoly by default and be vulnerable like Microsoft was to be torn up by the Feds?

[gbk666]

Yeah, we German webmasters seem to see the problematic a bit sharper than maybe the whole rest of the fest. No wonder google did not update their image search in Germany as well as France yet as the two only exceptions worldwide as far as i know.

Here in Germany Copyright rules are harder than anywhere else it seems..here the people can be sued for images which would clearly be under the "fair use" rule in the USA

[gemeweb]

gbk666 - Hope that Germany will save the webmasters. Some news about the new image search? Someone said that he has seen the old image search a few days ago. I hope Google will return the image search back the old version.

[HuskyPup]

both did not prevent the images to be hotlinked by google for me =/

Hmmm ... do you have this in your WP htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?example.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

For me this still allows Google to show the image, when hotlinked the image may flash for a second or on a refresh disappear, it depends on the browser, whichever way it's useless for anyone wanting to hotlink, of course it does not stop anyone copying the image however we all know that's easy enough to do anyway.

Let me know if this works for you.

[helleborine]

WOW. This is quite unbelievable.

Remember a few posts back I said that I moved all my images to a different folder, blocked that new folder from bots, specifically blocked images from bots on my root directory pages, and refs with .htacess?

COMPLETELY INEFFECTIVE

I don't know through what voodoo, but Google is showing images from by image folders that is blocked to its bot, following its own instructions!

NOW I AM FURIOUS

I have done everything in my power to protect myself yet

MY CONTENT IS RAPED

[helleborine]

I'm switching to this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} bing [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F] 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} BingPreview
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*images/.google.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://mywebsite\.com [R]

[TheMadScientist]

( Mods note: Just removed a number of off-topic messages preceding this one, including some badly written mod_rewrite code scraped from another site.


Let me 'point people in a direction' since we've got mod_rewrite Fugliness ITT and if anyone uses it they could slow their server to a crawl...

It's this way ---> to the Apache Forum [webmasterworld.com].
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:17 am (utc) on Feb 3, 2013]

[Catia]

For everybody out there trying to block Google's hotlinks through htaccess - I just did some experiments and according to my Apache logs, when Google Images loads an image, the referrer is left blank. I don't mean blank as in: "http://www.google.com/blank.html" - I mean blank as in "-".

This sorta says to me that unless you block all blank referrers, which could have some unintended consequences, there isn't any way to intercept those requests.

Am I missing something? Any Apache gurus out there with thoughts?

[TheMadScientist]

This sorta says to me that unless you block all blank referrers, which could have some unintended consequences, there isn't any way to intercept those requests.

You can separate Google IP addresses from 'everything' so you don't have to block all blanks ... But, the technicalities of 'getting things right' are really more for the Apache Forum, in my opinion, so I'll just leave it at:

You don't need to block all blanks; mod_rewrite is way more powerful and useful than an 'all or nothing' type statement.

[Catia]

I agree this probably belongs on an Apache forum, guess I'll go haunt them now... :-)

[helleborine]

I don't know if Google Images is doing it on purpose, but there seems to be no easy solution for blocking it.

[HuskyPup]

I'm blocking hotlinking with no problem on my template sites and my gallery CMS however WordPress seems to be 50-50, sometimes my code works fine and then other times not at all no matter which browser I use.

I'm wondering whether it's some sort of local caching issue since if I leave it for an hour my code works therefore I assume that the temporary caching has been cleared.

Would that make sense?

[matrix_jan]

Here's what I did and so far it looks good.

1. Only few user agents are allowed to crawl my images (googlebot, msnbot, facebook, pinterest, baidu and few more). This is done because of the blank referrer used in https. The rest get redirected to the parent page (which contains the image).

2. If there is a referrer I serve watermarked(a very large one, other than that all images are watermarked with the company name by default) and scaled image. This is for forums and websites that hotlink, so Bing and Google are excluded from this option.

=======
Possible answers :)

Why allow facebook and pinterest?
Because if there is a need for pinning or sharing an image, then I'd like to be the lucky one who's serving it... I look at it as a free ad.

Why allow google and bing bots?
The web is huge, and if the main content (at least what people mainly come for) of your website is images, then blocking search engines is like shooting yourself in the foot.

=======

After upgrading my server I use less than 20% of the bandwidth limit. So blocking images has nothing to do with the usage. It's just that people tend to click on bad quality images in order to see the image in normal quality they were looking for.

There are only few powers that can change google. Governments, competitors, and webmasters. I don't think the first two have any chance(perhaps besides Fr and De), so don't underestimate the power of unity.

[mserafim]

very sad situation for all webmasters .. for the entire internet ...

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 12:36 am (utc) on Feb 4, 2013]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please follow the forum charter rules [/edit]

[lucy24]

If it can be done, g### can find a way to override it.

Why allow facebook and pinterest?

You don't need to exempt pinterest. Their code is already set up so the user sees a hotlinked image but your logs show a normal page request.

[popac]

Solution for image protection is combination of htaccess, use of GDlibrary and PHP config file (protect.php).

I hope that there are good programmers who can do it with ease.

[matrix_jan]

@lucy24

Pinteres hotlinks? They crawl and copy the image. I was talking about "Pinterest/0.1 +http://pinterest.com/"

@mserafim

The image is being loaded inside an iframe. There is no way that an image can force a break from an iframe. If the image is redirected to another image then you'll see the redirected one. If the image is redirected to a html page (my case) then cached image is being shown.

[TheMadScientist]

I don't know through what voodoo, but Google is showing images from by image folders that is blocked to its bot, following its own instructions!

I don't 'do' image search and I don't have time to really 'dig in to it' right now, but it likely has to do with them 'requesting the image on behalf of the visitor' and not actually requesting the image with their bot.

If it can be done, g### can find a way to override it.

To do it, you'd have to basically 'cloak' ... So, you'd have to discard the X-Forwarded-For header, check for any IPs in Google's ranges, then block those IPs ... They can't get around it that way (unless they throw protocol out the window like AOL used to, but they're not known to 'totally break protocol' even though they push the limits on things as far as they can) ... It's not a simple thing to do though and the 'back end' needs to be updated regularly, because as they add/drop IP Address ranges the blocking would have to be updated.

TL;DR Version:

It likely can be done, but to do it you have to be technically proficient and 'all over the script' to keep it working.

###

ADDED: It might be possible by running image location requests through a PHP script and doing a reverse lookup on the 'down stream' IP Address if the referrer is not example.com to see if it's Google requesting the image on behalf of one of their visitors ... If you can detect it, then you can 'break it' but running image requests though a PHP page isn't something in everyone's 'bag of tricks', so it's probably not a 'large-scale' solution.