To block or not to block, that's the question.
 

Google and Yahoo image searches, that is :)

I started to think about it yesterday since I got 1500+ from Yahoo for just 1 keyword. Right now I block it and show a picture with the scorpiolinks.com URL in it. I got about 200 extra hits to Scorpio Links, so it shows that some people type in the URL at least.

But if the traffic is of good quality, then it's probably a waste to have the hotlink protection on for Yahoo and Google.
What I find is that it's not very well targetted. So that's one reason why I would still keep the hotlink protection on and send the traffic to a generic site. BUT, Google/Yahoo is probably not very fond of it, since the surfer doesn't get the same image as the spider found. So they might penalize you.

What do you think?

yeah I think you should smoke weed too... oh shit wrong question/answer :D but seriously I wouldn't block SE image traffic... it is after all people searching for porn pics which is what we all want right? it might not be highly targeted but it is horny SOBs looking for porn :D try unblocking it for a month or two and compare your results... and then fill us all in ;)

If you want to unblock Google and Yahoo in your hotlink protection, add this to it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*yahoo\.com(:[0-9]+)?($|/) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z0-9-]+\.)*google\.([a-z]{2,3}|[a-z]{2}\.[a-z]{2})(:[0-9]+)?($|/) [NC]

Yahoo only uses .com for all country specific portals they have.
Google has all kinds of TLD's, but it will cover: 2-3 char TLD's (ca,com,net,se,dk.....) and the ones that has co.uk, co.jp for example. So theoretically it would let through a fusker site that was on a 2 char domain like as.ca, but I doubt that will ever exist :)

Yeah, I think you should smoke some weed too.|potleaf| In fact, we should all smoke some |potleaf| it'll take the edge off.
I tried your suggestion a while ago but I rather liked the results I got the other way. It still comes down to it being a numbers game.

Ummm, que? :D

I have found and heard image traffic is not all that productive, probably free loaders looking for more free porn. But it's traffic I guess..:)

ronnie

That's my stand too. But if hotlink protection is turned on, what we're basically doing is cloaking.

If we take a regular html page as an example. You serve Google one thing and the surfer will see something else, big fat ban from Google.

If we do the same thing for images (hotlink protection turned on), will we sooner or later go the same route as with serving different text content? Banned from the SE.
I can see how it will become that. If we don't want the images to be crawled by the SE, we should've add a block for them in robots.txt.

hhmm.. I cant see how that could or would be cloaking, in the SE spammer sense. Your just protecting your images, sure even google has some protection. It's a well know problem, thats been around for a long time.

ronnie

Swedguy can you email me please if your interested in some link exchanges?

Sue

ronnie,

What is it that you want to protect your images from?

If you look at it from SE's POV it could be seen as cloaking. Different content is served.
Both images and text is copyrighted. But we still let them spider the text, so we can get hits. We also let them spider our images, so we can get hits. Maybe not as productive traffic, but that's our POV.

Spiders doesn't only spider regular html pages anymore. Images, videos, PDF, Power Point presentations, you name it.
Some doesn't like getting their PDF's spidered and some doesn't like their images spidered, but from SE's POV I don't think they appreciate that all hits to the document is redirected elsewhere. But from our POV, it's good. We can get more traffic to somewhere else. But it's the same thing as redirecting all traffic going to HTML pages, it's just a different media.



SaucyPanties,

Just send me a PM with your URL(s) and I'll take a look at it.

Maybe I mis-understood your orginal post. I thought it was just about keeping google from hot linking your images. Maybe I am missing it or did'nt read the posts well enough. From what I read, your just blocking google or yahoo from loading the real image on their page or results. instead your giving them a different image, your not redirecting them. Guess I dont understand how it's cloaking, maybe just me..:)

I was saying the problem of hot linking has been around for a long time, I cant see the SE's penalizing any one for trying to stop it from happening to their site(s). Or having a system in place to try and prevent it.

ronnie

No, with blocking I just meant a general hotlinking block (the same that everybody else is using).
Most of the people redirect to a HTML page, which will result in a broken image if it's hotlinked from another HTML page.
But if it's coming from Google it usually redirects to the HTML page (depending on if the image is on a HTML page or not). Example: http://images.google.com/images?q=po...ff&sa=N&tab=wi pic #2, #4, #5

Some redirect to another image with an URL on it (that's what I did).

The more I think about, the more I think both ways are bad. Both serve different content than what the spider found.
They might not mind or taken care of it right now. But further down the road I think we might face the same consequences as if we redirected a HTML page (banned).

Probably the only one that might be ok, is if the hotlink protection sends a "Forbidden". They know as well as we do that hotlinking is a problem.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gui...s.html#quality
"Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects."

I do agree with Ronnie |thumb |cool|