How To Deal With HotLinking

Whether you’re building up a website or a blog, you’re going to need to use pictures. Some of those pictures may in fact be yours and hosted on your own site, but a lot of people seem to find it easier to link to the picture rather than uploading it directly.

The process of display a picture on your site that is shown elsewhere is known as Hotlinking. While it may be new to some of you, for the rest of you, it’s fairly familiar. By linking to a picture on another site, you’re stealing their bandwidth from them to display that picture, but you’re also sending them some free Googlebot love as it is a direct link back to that image. Furthermore, clicking on the image sends you directly to the image on its own server.

Overall, hotlinking is considered to be in poor taste, but much of that stems from the days of yore. Remember when you could push a site over its bandwidth limit just by hotlinking to it or even refreshing the site continuously? Those days are clearly gone, but some of the stigmatisms still stand.

For the person using the image, hotlinking can be risky. Think about it, if they move the image location or delete the image, your site looks awful now. Imagine if it’s on a deep page that you don’t visit often but does get a good number of hits. Now you look like a fool.

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal referenced a conversation with Aaron Pratt, a member of the Google Groups Webmaster Help, in which Pratt said “anything linked to including images shows that people out there might like what you have, google then has to determine is the linking is real or make believe. :)”

What Baker’s results proved was that the images began to gain more weight on the Google Image Searches if it was properly tagged. There wasn’t any huge number of hits from people clicking on the images in his test, and rarely would they pass any linkjuice worth noting.

So for those of you with images on your site and worry that the images will be hotlinked to, add a simple watermark to your images. This means that either you’re going to have a nice advertisement on the page of the person who stole the image, or they’re going to have to resize it and upload it themselves to avoid your watermark. Just remember, don’t hurt how your visitors see your images by using a huge ugly watermark just to prevent people from stealing it!

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