dam hotlinkers - I need help!

[swedguy]

Originally posted by ponygirl
swedguy - I know it's probably not the greatest traffic, but if they're going to my index page, at least it's my site & not just a pic?

They will never see your index page if the image is hotlinked.

Not sure how to explain it, but I'll do my best

If Chatropolis hotlinks one of you images, it comes from one of their HTML pages inside an <img src="http://yourdomain.com/01.jpg">. Inside an IMG tag, only images are allowed. So what happens when the image request comes to your site is that they get redirected to your index.html (because of the hotlinks protection). So the index.html is loaded inside the IMG tag, which doesn't show up properly because it's not an image, so a broken image will appear on the Chatropolis page.

But if they have added links to your images <a href="http://yourdomain.com/01.jpg"> if they click the link they will get redirected to your index page and they will see it.

The last one is the way Google Images works, if they click on the "See full-size image".

So if bandwidth is a concern, you should redirect hotlink traffic to a light-weight html page with few images, since both the HTML page and the images will be loaded.

If bandwidth isn't a concern, send the traffic to where ever it makes you most money