Hotlinking - how to get it to stop

Neither webmaster nor webhost have responded

[HRoth]

A competitor is hotlinking to a pic on my site. I emailed him asking him to stop, but he has not and he has not responded. I emailed his webhost yesterday, but they have not responded either. How long should I wait for them to respond? And what should I do if they don't? Meanwhile, I have changed the image to show my url.

[larryhatch]

Hi HRoth: You have already done what I usually do in most cases.
I swap image filename. The hotlinker presents whatever I choose,
usually a nice (small) commercial for my site.
I have to change the original html page to point to the original image
under a new name of course. No biggie.

I make sure the 'commercial' is smaller in bytes to save bandwidth.
That's usually enough for me, then I pop open a beer.

One blog in Holland was hotlinking my images mercilessly.
I could never get thru to them. I wound up substituting all kinds
of real small images, one was just a comic footprint.

I considered .htaccess solutions, but this is more fun and I get to
put up my little 'commercials'. Best wishes -Larry

[frenzy77]

Hi HRoth:)

Here's a thread i found on blocking hotlinking.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps:)

Good luck:)

frenzy77

[jomaxx]

What's the problem? Why are you pursuing this?

You can block external image referrers via a .htaccess file (don't block blank referrers), but you might as well leave that image alone unless you object to the free advertising you're getting.

[joeduck]

this is more fun and I get to
put up my little 'commercials'

Very clever solution. This approach turns a problem into an advantage and saves you the (usually wasted) time and effort trying to get other websites to make changes.

Larry - I wonder if this approach could be broadened to combat scrapers who take a snippet using a 302 redirect? It would take some time, but you could change the snippet so that an ad, rather than your content, appeared at their site. Hmmm -but then you'd have to reorganize the content at your own page and it would get scraped again...probably not viable solution to scraping.

[ken_b]

LarryHatch and Jomaxx have touched on the solution I use to deal with hot linking.

In my case I put my url on almost all of my images and reap the benefit of the traffic they generate for my site.

I haven't always done that, and hot linking was something I just lived with before I started labeling my images.

The day I uploaded the labeled images my traffic went up 20%.

I did that in between updates on Google, so the jump in traffic was most likely due to the labeled images rather than any jump in serps positions. Of course I can't prove that, but it seems reasonable to me.

Here's an interesting side aspect of this.

Hot linking increased also. More hot linking, more free ads for my site spread around the net, more traffic to my site.

Rinse and repeat.

[HRoth]

Changing the image to my url worked in the sense that the guy who owns the website finally contacted me tonight and took it down. I was wishing there was some way to make the image clickable!

I do not want to block image searches. I get a lot of people who come to look at an image and then they stay and look around, bookmark the site, and some buy things. I figure this is a good way to get customers I would not have access to otherwise.

Anyway, thanks all. If I had not read about people changing a stolen image to show their url on this website previously, I would not have thought of doing it. It made me happy to see his page with my url on it.:)

[timchuma]

I had one of my images being accessed thousands of times from a forum so I went there and registered to make it known that I wanted it to stop.

You can also redirect the image to an anti-hotlinking image or just a "image hosted on" placeholder.

Thanks.