google and hotlink blocking
 

I've noticed in my logs that I get a fair amount of hits/requests for individual images from the google image search. I use htaccess to block hotlinking, so of course they just end up getting the red "x". Same with the google cached pages--text but no images. Anyone know if blocking google from linking my images affects how my sites are ranked? Also, any opinions on the relative merits vs. disadvantages to adding google to the "allowed to link to images" list in my htaccess file?

Thanks!
Lee

I added Google to my good domains in my htaccess.

BW is cheap and I would prefer people see my pages with the images the way I intended them to be seen not with a bunch of Xs in them.

I have all my hotlinkers going to my hot link page.


Cleo what is the code for allowing a domain to hotlink? I never allowed that before but I'm getting tons of error codes from several SE's.

I'm giving away my precious SE info here. ;)

You already have your own domains in your htaccess file, just add in the SE's domains too, same way you have your own domains.

Thanks :)

Thanks for responding, Cleo. Yeah, the cached pages do look really crappy without any images. And google does link to the actual page that provided the picture if people click the thumbnail, so maybe I'm missing out on traffic from that link. Google is now on the honor roll.
Thanks again!
Lee

thrillho,

Are you getting stuff like images.google.xx/imgres in your referrer stats, with .htaccess protecting your images?

Coz when I allowed Google to hotlink, I saw an increase in this kind of referrer.

Thanks for the heads up, urb. I'll keep a very close eye on my logs image requests!

Definitely allow that bot in there - Ive found some good conversions from those hits :)

Now I'm a bit confused.

urb--images.google.xx/imgres is a good thing or bad? looks like either a foreign google or something trying to sneak past htaccess by posing as google?

Linkster--the bot you're referring to being the google bot? Is there one specific that just searches for the images that I'd be blocking with no hotlinking?

thrillho - the bot that Google uses identifies itself as
Googlebot-Image - you can prevent it from indexing your images in the robots.txt file by adding this to it:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

However I have only had good returns from the image search feature of Google :) - sure there's plenty of people looking for free pics, but then there sure are a lot going to our sites for the same thing :)

The referrer in your logs would look like this:
"GET /drew-barrymore.html HTTP/1.1" 200 12966 "http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=www.celebrity-nude-photos.com/pics/3288.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.celebrity-nude-photos.com/drew-barrymore.html&h=542&w=600&sz=66&tbnid=i30RCXcUfxoJ:&tbnh=120&tbnw=132&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcelebrity%2Bnude%26svnum%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26newwindow%3D1%26safe%3Doff" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

or something like it :)

Gotcha. I have seen those entries in the log--thanks for the info!
(and, based on my money niche, the entry would probably be more likely to start out GET /jade_barrymore |jester| )

thrillho - one other thing thats pretty important - to me at least - is that Google really doesn't hotlink your images - they download one copy and serve that thumbnail in their search results from their own servers - if someone clicks for the big image, then Google displays your image as well as the page that it is on :)

I see what you're saying, and I've changed all my htaccess to allow google and images.google, but what I'm still a bit confused about is why, if the google bot is making copies of everything that are then brought back to it's server, my anti-hotlinking code would disallow google's display of those google-served images?
And thanks again for your help!

(not sure if that was clear. I mean the cached pages people can optionally view on the regular search, not the image search)

On the regular search, they only cache the code of the page - not the images - so in that case they would be "hot-linking" the pics if you allowed them to - again - I get a lot of people that find me in the regular search listings and look at the site to see if thats what they are looking for - and again to me that means that the people that do come are a little more targetted or "filtered" :)

OK, now I get it! And I completely agree that it's totally worth a little bandwidth for nice filtered SE traffic.

Muchas gracias.
Lee

Hi all,
Interesting thread, does anyone mind if I link to this from another adult webmaster board?
Thanks,
Jel

See it as a picpost, with 100% google traffic - that's a pretty good deal so wouldn't block it |bananna|