Stop Junk Links to my website.

Finding incoming links from questionable sites.

[grandma genie]

Hello,
Lately I am finding referrers in my server logs from adult content sites. What does not make sense is the links are to images on my site that are attempted hotlinks, but since I have blocked the hotlinking, the visitor from the questionable site is getting a 403 forbidden page. My site is family oriented (I sell stuffed animals) and I find it extremely offensive to have someone trying to use my pictures (tigers, hippos, rhinos, etc.) on their raunchy websites. Somehow I think it is one of my competitors trying to ruin my ranking in the search engines. I can't imagine why these people would be using my pix anyway, and since the pix don't show up on their site anyway (just a broken link) why do they keep doing it and how do I stop them. So far the only thing I can think of is to move the page. These sites are extremely offensive and I'd rather not try to contact them. Is there a solution to my dilemma?
Here is an example of the server log entry:
66.66.nn.nn - - [16/Sep/2010:22:15:56 -0400] "GET /rhinos_pix.jpg HTTP/1.1" 403 320 "nylonlove.net/tmp/little-teenie.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)"
-- Grandma_genie

[SteveWh]

I tend to doubt that this is someone trying to hurt your search engine rankings, and even if it were, it wouldn't accomplish that objective.

More likely, it's an inexperienced webmaster just trying to use your images on their site.

In order to get your images, they visited your website. As a result, your images are in their browser cache. When they visit their own web page, with the hotlinked images, they see the images because they are seeing the copies from their browser cache, and the page looks normal to them. They are probably not aware that when everyone else visits their website, the page is full of red X's because those people haven't visited your site first.

In my opinion, your hotlink protection is the only thing you should do. Any other attempt at a remedy will tip off the webmaster that their pages are ugly because all the hotlinked images are broken links.

[phranque]

almost 6 year old thread that is still relevant:
Hotlink Protection Tutorial [webmasterworld.com]

[grandma genie]

It would appear that the server logs only show someone who was visiting the adult content site downloaded the page via Browser with a question mark where my picture should have been. If the picture has a link to my site, (and some do not) the visitor only gets the 403 forbidden page and never actually gets to see my site. So I will just ignore those server log entries.

What happens if you block the IP of the site in question?

Thank you for your comments. -- Grandma_genie

[SteveWh]

What happens if you block the IP of the site in question?

That won't do anything useful. The visitors first receive the page from the adult site. That page, in the visitor's browser, contains the *references* to the images from your site. Those references are instructions to their browser to then request the actual images from your site, to fill in the page. Thus, it's the visitor's browser that is requesting the images from your site. The adult site itself isn't requesting your images, so blocking their IP won't help.

The hotlink protection basically says "refuse to serve the image if the *referer* (not the requestor) is a site other than yours".

[grandma genie]

I see. I guess it is hopeless then. I bet most of these sites find my pix in Google Images, Yahoo Images, etc. I've tried to block the image bots from taking my pix in robots.txt, so hopefully, eventually, my pix will stop showing up in those places. Most of the visitors to my site are looking for pictures. Too bad I can't find a way to charge them for them. I'd be rich! - Thanks Steve and phranque.