Hot-link merchant's image

Scripts to avoid google detection

[jimpoo]

Hi There, I'm operating 10 websites selling flowers, all the flower images on my websites are hot-link to the merchant's like this <img src="merchantsite/images/flowers.jpg"> , I wonder if google could detect this and ban all these 10 websites or maybe just some of them, or maybe give these websites a low pagerank, if I don't want to download all the flower images into each of my website's image folders, any scripts can replace the following html tags?
<img src="merchantsite/images/flowers.jpg">
and avoid google detection? or maybe modify .htaccess file?

I know google could detect that there are a lot of 'buy link' (affiliate link) which redirect visitors to the merchant's website, I could use the idea like the following to avoid google:
----------------------------
The original link: [afflink...] ,
Would be replaced as a javascript:
linkStr="http://aff";
linkStr=linkStr+"link/"+"?"+"affID";
linkStr=linkStr+"1234";
location.href=linkStr;
-----------------------------

any better idea?

[Yidaki]

allthough i highly doubt that google would have a problem with the image linking alone (remember all the image servers like akamai etc. that serve thousand of images for thousand of different websites), i'd mod the htaccess file if you fear problems.

However, if you operate ten websites that all sell the same product there are other reasons to get paranoid. ;)

[ShawnR]

Hi

I'm not a frequent poster to the Google News forum, but from what I have read, posts such as 'please help me fool google' or 'how can I spam' are not really welcome. The idea of the forum is more along the lines of analysing google behaviour, and based on that, figuring out legitimate ways to optimise, not spam.

Did you mean to ask "Is linking to pictures from an affiliate website purely for the purpose of bandwidth considered spam?" or are you really saying "I know this is spam, but please help me fool google"?

Shawn

PS Anyone who hangs out at this forum a lot, feel free to contradict if I am wrong...

[Yidaki]

Shaw, you don't have to be a attorney to know that judging without knowing all relevant facts is unfair - no matter if your guesses are right or wrong. ;)

Back to your second question, jimpoo:

>I know google could detect that there are a lot of 'buy link' (affiliate link)
>any better idea?

That's a different problem than hotlinking images ... however, what about yoursite.com/out.cgi?id=12345? Disallow out.cgi through a robots.txt entry and make the out.cgi a redirect to the corresponding merchant page. That'd pretty safe! Safer than using js ... which would smell fishy.

[figment88]

mod rewrite

[jimpoo]

A merchant provide their product info (including image url) to his affiliates, this is so call datafeeds.
If hundreds and thousands of affiliate websites hot-link to the images, and hot-link to the affiliate program server (redirection), my question is, if this hurt the merchant or the affiliates pagerank in google? If so, any scripts could avoid this problem?
Thanks

[Yidaki]

>If so, any scripts could avoid this problem?

Not any script but some script. A redirect cgi does. Mod_rewrite / htaccess does. JavaScript doesn't.

[jimpoo]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://mywebsite.com/myproductimages/^.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://wwWebmasterWorldebsite.com/myproductimages/^.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ [merchantwebsite...] [L,R]

Not works!

[jdMorgan]

This should work in your web root (homepage) directory .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?mywebsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^myproductimages/(.*)$ http://merchantwebsite/images/$1 [L,R]

Ref: Introduction to mod_rewrite [webmasterworld.com]

HTH,
Jim