Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Matt
I was thinking it may stop people hot linking my images. I never considered using the technique for nefarious purposes! Silly me!
Doh!
Matt
if a thousand people hotlinked someone's apple, you can be sure that it's a good picture of an apple. at least the owner would get some benefit then, coming top of the image search results.
What? - Yah. I had some articles back then which had 2 images in each article, and ranked like #2058 on google - at some point people began to hotlink those images from my server to their websites - a month or so later, the articles which they were related to ranked #2-3 on Google on the keywords used in the images alt-text and the nameofpicture.jpg
But don't know if it works anymore... and would depend on the picture and reputation of your site in general...
Not sure how that'd work in the payday loan market. Pics of loan sharks? :).
I never considered using the technique for nefarious purposes!
They're usually much more limited in the way they gain reputation, thus also decreasing the methods and link styles alot which makes them "hot" in their respective areas, so it probably wouldn't work for them....
I was lucky with those pictures in the articles, was just something everybody else had overlooked doing but which was high in demand and which googles algorithm recognized as being of a certain relevant standard in their image search, which gave me a couple of thousand visitors each day, and some attractive photos which were hotlinked alot of other places and then also counted as votes for my articles (which was the reason I ranked high in the image search to begin with), thus they gained alot of reputation algorithmically and the articles showed up on those very, very popular keyword searches..
I believe, based on my limited experience, and the network I usually see changes and rankings on which is based on google - that they have other algorithms which counts for and against you - depending on various factors such as your business, keyword popularity, and so on, and all that statistical data they have at their disposal is not just lying around doing nothing.
And to be honest, in some of their models - a link can count very heavily against you - especially on relevant websites because they're in your competitive range if you're in the business or service industry... but it's a long and complex discussion and not one i'm willing to pursue here. Stop caring about what google does, and do what needs to be done.... if you have an image, then let people hotlink it everywhere they want - then just update the original picture with a huge sign with your url on it. Bam. Instant advertising.
[edited by: RandomDot at 10:32 pm (utc) on Sep. 21, 2007]
