Blocking Blogspot.com?

Is it possible to block blogspot links? And is it worth it?

[joep11]

Hey there,

Noticing 100's of crappy blogspot links when analyzing some of our clients backlink profiles in Ahrefs.com

These links ty[ically carry a 0 DR and spawn 100's of subdomains, in what appears to be some sort of hotlinking or image hotlinking.

Is it worth it disavow these blogspot links? OR is it possible to block this sort of spammy link network from our domain side in the code?

[lucy24]

some sort of hotlinking or image hotlinking

Clarify, please. Are you describing links (to some place in your HTML) or hotlinks (directly to images)?

If you’re not already blocking hotlinks-in-general, you should.

[joep11]

Yeah, I believe hotlinks (directly to images). I just ran a site explorer on ahrefs.com for one site and there were 270 blogspot.com links.

270 referring domains with a 0 DR all stemming from blogspot.com --> to our clients URL

What is the technique to block hotlinks?

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:34 pm (utc) on Jun 8, 2022]
[edit reason] Removed specific URL names. [/edit]

[lucy24]

blogspot sites tend to be made by people who are utterly and hopelessly clueless, and simply don't understand that they are hotlinking. This is not only immoral, but creates a terrible user experience if there are lots of them on a single page. I don't know about current blogspot admiistration, but at times in the past they have been helpful when you ask them to remove a hotlink. But it can get to be a whack-a-mole, not worth it if there are vast numbers of them.

Exact wording will depend on your server type; if Apache, it would go something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://example\.com/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !\b(onesite|othersite|thirdsite)\b
RewriteRule \.(jpg|gif|png)$ /pictures/hotlink.png [L]

Translation: if all conditions are met, rewrite the image request to an image that is intentionally made as hideous as possible. If you don't feel like creating one--mine features NO HOTLINKS text on a chartreuse-and-magenta background--simply block the request [F]. But the image is a good approach because it makes the offending site look bad, and it may actually be less work for your server.
Condition #1: referer is not your own site
Condition #2: but there is a referer (this is to exempt search engines, who don't send a referer with image requests)
Condition #3: this part is site-specific. Poke holes for other sites that are allowed to hotlink or direct-link to your images. My own exemptions are a couple of message boards where I might post a picture that ultimately lives on my own site, and just-to-be-safe some other sites that belong to me. Most importantly, if your images are indexed by search engines, also poke holes for google, bing and so on.

If you're not on apache, head for the appropriate subforum such as IIS for guidance on syntax.