Hot linking, the latest and the greatest

[NickMNS]

In the past I had been heavily impacted by hotlink spam sites linking to my content, but I managed to effectively block it. Yeah! At the same time my rankings went up. Today, as a result of the update, my rankings went down. Correlation is not causation, but still I figured, I should take a look in detail at some of the search results for my site. And sure enough the hotlinking is back. But not like before. My blocking remains effective.

The spammers are now using Google images, that is they link to your image and using Javascript, "onerror" fallback on a Google image search url of the image. So if you block them, that's ok they will steal from Google.

I'm not sure how truly effective the technique is, a few of the links I checked were not working in either instance, but some where.

How the heck are you supposed to fight that?

[not2easy]

I can't see that as a smart long term strategy. Since they are ultimately hotlinking to Google's copies of your images, that has to be obvious to their own purloined libraries. They don't use the same image you have, they use their own version/copy of yours. Unless something changed at least, they used .png copies of .jpg images.

[NickMNS]

They don't use the same image you have, they use their own version/copy of yours.

No they are hotlinking a gstatic.com subdomain here:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9.......

[JorgeV]

Hello,

If you don't mind getting your images indexed by google, you can embed them into your pages using base64 encoding.

[NickMNS]

@Jorge

If you don't mind getting your images indexed by google

Did you mean "if you don't mind NOT getting your images indexed"?

[tangor]

g brought this upon themselves with their cached and collected image library. Up to them to fix it.

[NickMNS]

Up to them to fix it.

Granted, I see your point, but it is my content that is being stolen.

[tangor]

Yours? Didn't you give it g in the first place?

[martinibuster]

Re: Hot Linking
The hot linking may have already been going on and unnoticed until the update. The two may not be connected otherwise your rankings would have tanked awhile ago when the hot linking actually started.

It's like your car wont' start and you notice there's a gash on the hood of the car. And you say, Oh I never saw that before! That must be why the car won't start.

It's not an unreasonable assumption that the hot linking is connected, but that could already have been there and not be the problem, like the example of the gash in the hood.

[NickMNS]

@martinibuster
I never suggested that this particular instance of hotlinking was related to my drop from the update. What I said was, quoting my OP:

Correlation is not causation, but still I figured, I should take a look

So I looked, and I found.