Myspace, Xanga, team-ulm.etc

Too Many Referrals?

[Skier]

Over the past six months referrals from the sites mentioned above, plus a huge list of other similar sites (mostly ***.de), have grown from insignificant to about 70% of total.

My site has enjoyed a stable ratio of referrals with G running at about 60% for the past five years. The absolute number of G referrals remains about the same.

I have tried to follow the links back to the referring sites to see what the context of the anchor link was, but to no avail. Searching the sites has never revealed a single link to my site.

I guess I am happy to have referrals from these sites, but sometimes I get to wondering what is really going on here.

[encyclo]

Are you sure the problem isn't hotlinked images in forums and chats? If so, you should use mod_rewrite to block calls to image files with external referrers.

[phantombookman]

encyclo
I am plagued by myspace in my logs, all picture hotlinking on blogs.
Unfortunately my stats do not give the exact location so I cannot track them down.

I am on a windows server, do you have any suggestions that do not require adding code to every page?

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions

[jezra]

phantombookman --
I had a similar problem with images being leeched in forums. There is an open source leech blocker plugin for Microsoft IIS that will return a 404 when an image file is requested from the server and the http_referer is NOT the server. An internet search for "leechblocker for IIS" should be able to help you.

[encyclo]

Windows servers are problematic as a rewrite module is not available by default. If it is a dedicated server then you can add ISAPI-Rewrite, or if you prefer you can run a separate image server on a server running Apache.

[phantombookman]

Hi Guys
thanks for the tips and info, I shall look into the suggestion.
Windows servers seem to have a lot of restrictions, all of which unknown to me at the time.

You live and learn

[Raymond]

If it is really just hotlinking of images, I personally would not block them, even if I could. Why don't you just put your watermark on the image, so you might get another source of traffic. Bandwidth is so cheap anyway (unless its a video).

If the person is interested enough to manually type in your URL after looking at the image, it is one of the BEST targetted traffic you can ever get.

[Skier]

Thank you for the replies.

"Hotlinking on blogs" "image leeching" - These seem to be likely culprits as we have images that would be quite popular.
That said, I should add that the images are not really on our site, but we do have links to some nice photo collections. Does it make sense for the blogs to hotlink to a link on my site?

I should admit that I am not confident that I understand exactly what a "hotlink' or "image leeching" is. Are they providing a hyperlink in text, or does this directly generate the image on the blog?

[rogerd]

They are inserting image code on their page, but instead of pulling the image from their server it is coming from your server. (IMG SRC=) If you are getting lots of hits in your logs, then you must have some images that are getting linked by others. If a photo appearing on your site is located on another site, then the leech would be pulling it from the third site, not yours.

You may need a better stats package to tell you what's going on.

[BradleyT]

The blogger puts the image on thier site and for the src attribute of the image tag they use a location on your server (using your bandwidth without you getting a visit).

[Skier]

Thank you Bradley and Rodger. I was afraid that the answer would be something like that.

I am using Livestats which I thought was a pretty good stats server. Are there others that would be able to identify the source deeper than Myspace, or Myspace.profile, and find me the actual source page?

My instincts tell me that there must be a few ways to take advantage of that traffic. Raymond's suggestion about watermarks makes sense. I do want to communicate with the visitors. They are in my target market if they are interested in those photos.

[Skier]

After considering the situation, I set off to study the whole subject of image searches and how my site handles them. There is a considerable volume of traffic from "legitimate" image searches too.

I have always shrugged off referrals from SE Image Searches as irrelevant. Silly me. My logs show that a worthwhile volume of potential customers found my site as an image search and went on to navigate into the rest of the site.

What surprised me is how poorly my site handles image search visitors. It is hard to find the photo that the SERP thumbnail shows. Navigation aids to and from the images are terrible. Great news - I can improve my site a little tonite!

Optimization has always been about text to me, but maybe these days it could be about images as well.