Hotlink Protection and Google Mismatch Image Penalty - Need Help

[EnvyCore]

As some of you already know .. Hotlinking methods against google images is now a violation of Google quality guidelines, and Google has started to deindexing websites and to give a manual action penalty for image mismatch for those who using Hotlink methods: [support.google.com...]

I have images and clipart website and most of my traffic comes from google images search, I had htaccess file blocking all hotlinking and it's also redirecting (view image button) which suppose to show the full URL image in my server to home page instead.

and I even didn't know that i got this penalty until that i noticed that my traffic has dropped to about 90%, after investigations i found that I am not alone, and many webmasters has been hit by this new penalty in the last 3 weeks by Google for hotlink protection: [wordpress.org...] , [pixabay.com...] , and also there is some discussion about it in this forum.

After getting penalty and adding google to the whitelist of my htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?example\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://example.com [L]

I have submitted a reconsideration request and after about 2 weeks i received answer from google and the manual action has been revoked and my site got indexed again and it's showing on Google images search.

Since my site is back and I am allowing Google to eat my bandwidth, my traffic is not the same as before and it dropped to about 50% of what it used to be, while the bandwidth has increased dramatically, I mean that i am getting much less visitors and crazy bandwidth, I am checking my statistic now and i see that i have more than 300 GB of bandwidth and the day is not over yet.

The question is what to do now while google images is eating my bandwidth and people are able to see full sized images directly in google without even visiting my site ? and if someone can PLEASE help me with a good way to prevent hotlinking in my htaccess file so I can be able block google images from hotlinking to my images and at the same time not to block google bot and if someone want to click on the (view image) button on google images search they can see the image URL instead to redirecting them to forbidden page or to the home page (RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://example.com [L]),

I know what google is doing is illegal ! and Hotlinking is stealing. But I can't fight google, and i need to make a living also with my websites, so I have to obey and to follow their rules, but to be honest this is too much from google and I can't let them hotlink and eat my bandwidth like that, I am getting nothing for being hotlinked by google, it's not even worth to stay on Google images and let them control and use my images content and at the same time i am getting less visitors and i need to pay extra more for my server bandwidth.

I don't want to get a penalty again, but if i see there is no other option i will block google from hotlinking in the same as before, and penalty will be much cheaper than hotlinking :)

Any help will be very appreciated, and i hope your help will also help webmasters who is in the same situation as me.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 10:03 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2015]
[edit reason] replaced mysite with example.com [/edit]

[not2easy]

Welcome to the forums EnvyCore - Images can be no-indexed - but then they won't be seen in Google Images. It is a hard decision, but some have dealt with it by no-indexing the full size images and allowing thumbnails. How you can protect your bandwidth while gaining visitors is a problem that has hit a lot of sites. The ideal method shows enough to bring visitors without handing the keys over to a third party SE. If all your hi res images are in one folder, it is easier to no-index selectively.

[netmeg]

Long term, you probably have to think about whether or not this is going to remain a viable business model for you.

[jambam]

I didnt know this so you get penalized when google cannot steal your images? Wow. Why are people just letting google do this?

[Lame_Wolf]

Welcome to the forums EnvyCore - Images can be no-indexed - but then they won't be seen in Google Images. It is a hard decision, but some have dealt with it by no-indexing the full size images and allowing thumbnails. How you can protect your bandwidth while gaining visitors is a problem that has hit a lot of sites. The ideal method shows enough to bring visitors without handing the keys over to a third party SE. If all your hi res images are in one folder, it is easier to no-index selectively.

Are you saying that if you use Hotlink Protection, then your image[s] will not appear in Google Images?
And if you want them in Google Images, you'll have to turn off HP (either totally, or in part)

[tangor]

Answer to both questions is "yes".

In the second scenario you have control over what the SE sees and can protect the rest of your images. More work, but your high res images aren't being served by the SE for their "user benefit".

[Lame_Wolf]

Answer to both questions is "yes".

Thanks for getting back to me, but that wouldn't explain why only one site is affected.
They both use hot link protection.

<snip> still has loads of images listed, and they are doing something that I am not.

In the second scenario you have control over what the SE sees and can protect the rest of your images. More work, but your high res images aren't being served by the SE for their "user benefit".

They are not high res - they are just larger versions of the thumbnails. Some are clipart, and for them, there are no thumbnails, yet that have disappeared from Google Images.

I have been hit with "Site-wide matches" which is confusing the hell out of me. 10k+ images wiped out from their index. I've always played an honest game with them, and I don't know where to start looking to fix something that I don't think is broken.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:44 pm (utc) on Oct 6, 2015]
[edit reason] removing name of specific site, per Admin request [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Regarding above edit in Lame_Wolf's post, complaint received from site whose name I removed states in part...

I feel the accusations the member is making are wrong, it sounds to us like he has hotlink protection enabled and that’s why he is having trouble.

I'm not here to discuss this... It's not an issue I've been involved with. I can only report request for edit and the information received, which I hope is helpful.

[creeking]

the hotlink protection causing the G problem........ is it the common type found in website control panels (like cpanel) ?

[Lame_Wolf]

I feel the accusations the member is making are wrong, it sounds to us like he has hotlink protection enabled and that’s why he is having trouble.

I mentioned said site, as they have been mentioned on here before.

I have 4 sites that use .htaccess for hotlink protection. Only one has been affected by Google.
It is not a plug-in like you get for wordpress, or anything that would redirect etc. It's just your normal bog-standard h/l protection.

[Lame_Wolf]

I've had my penalty lifted.

What did I do to fix it?... nothing.
I never blocked Google, or redirect an image to something else, and I wasn't hacked. So why I received this penalty in the first place will remain one of life's mysteries.

[EnvyCore]

This issue is serious and very painful for webmasters and photographers who is working with images and all traffic is based on google images search, Google want you to whitelist them so they can access your images directly and use your bandwidth without any problems.

Reaching over 300GB of bandwidth on each day is something I can't afford and at the same time getting little visitors in return from Google Images since any user at google can see and download the full image directly from Google images without even visiting my site.

After searching around and reading from other webmasters who is suffering from the same issue, the best option was to to remove all large and original images which was about 11,000 images from my site, and move them to a hidden directory, and creating auto generated download links for the images and make them available to download only from the website, at the same time allowing google images to hotlink to the small thumbnails and leave sample images with a small watermark on the corner with my site name, anyone who want to download any image .. they are welcome to visit my site and download the images.

After few days of testing, i can see the bandwidth is very normal now, about 1 to 1.5 GB daily, the traffic is increasing but it's less than before, but this is the best option i have at this moment for this situation.

[Lame_Wolf]

This issue is serious and very painful for webmasters and photographers who is working with images and all traffic is based on google images search, Google want you to whitelist them so they can access your images directly and use your bandwidth without any problems.

In my case, Google were never blocked. They've been "whitelisted" from day one.