Does being hotlinked count as an incoming link?

i'm being hotlinked for peoples forums sigs,do they count as incoming links

[demonofrog]

Hey Everybody, I've been reading these forums for ages so I figured i'd sign up and get posting at long last.

I run a site that gets a very large amount of google images hits (89% of my traffic!). Its a music desktop wallpaper site.

Anyway's, I've just been going through the logs and it seems that there are a couple of people using my images for their forum sigs. Some fools are using 1024x768 wallpaper for tiny 200x200 pics!

Now, i'm aware that I can stop this using htaccess etc but I was wondering if leaving this be for a while might be a good idea as i'm trying to increase my search engine ranking. Do this count to the search engines as incoming links from these other sites?

Thanks!

[Span]

Welcome to the forums, demonofrog.

If a hotlinked image is between <a> tags, linked to your site, then yes, it is an incoming link. Otherwise it is just a hotlinked image.

[Nuttakorn]

How can I optimize the image for ranking high in Google Images? Named the images as keyword, link from many pages, having link in that image?

[demonofrog]

Nuttakorn, sounds like your approaching things the right way. For 2-Word or more filenames I always tend to use a hyphen as opposed to a underscore etc... Maybe i'm wrong here but I know that google can tokenise hypenated phrases but not those with underscores etc... How much of an impact on your google images ranking this has i'm not 100% Try and have plenty of relevent, keyword heavy text around the image as possible as this also helps out.

Does anybody have a definitive answer on whether the filename has much of an impact on google image searches? Also how much of a role does pagerank play here? Is it just the same as with regular google searches?

[diamondgrl]

If they are linking to your image, then they are just draining bandwidth. Links for PR purposes only count for pages, not images.

That's because search engines index pages, not images. And PR can't "flow" from an image to your other pages.

[demonofrog]

good point diamondgrl, I think I'll start looking around now for a funny pic to divert those hotlinks too :)

[kevinpate]

> for a funny pic to divert those hotlinks too

Which will still drain bandwidth. Then again, it's your bandwidth. If wasting it is your preference, knock yourself out.

[Craig_F]

you'll have a hard time fighting this so why not try helping them? take the most popular images and make smaller versions of them for use in forums, provided they use your code. Give them the code right there *with a real link around the image back to your site*.