My referrers in Firefox is off (I happen to do this for various reasons, many of my friends do that too). Since my referrer was disable on Firefox, I detected that one of our client’s images were broken. Quickly I realized that it may be that they have stopped the hot-linking, in other words the images can only open it is embedded in your website (or the once approved by you). This is how the code looks like:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ – [F,NC]
In most of the articles you will find people asking you to stop the hotlinking for following reasons:
- It discourages the thief from stealing your images
- It protects your bandwidth and server
- Also it can help you protect again some of the attacks towards badwidth
- It helps you in copyright protection.
- Some people say that even it hurts the image ranking Hmmm…
Isn’t bandwidth cheaper now? Upto Unlimited free
When I started my career in 2002, web was certainly expensive, everything was limited (Bandwidth, internet etc) but within few years things got cheaper (Even our company had incentives for consuming the available bandwidth). We talking of an era where Youtube can showcase millions of videos (high bandwidth consumption) free of cost, why then protect the bandwidth? Still here is a remedy.
Remedy for image bandwidth protection, keep the hotlinking on
You can have all the important images like submit button, FB, Twitter connects etc (all the important images) on your main server. Make a subdomain called hotimages.domain.com or img1.domain.com (or any fancy subdomin) and keep your images (that has a threat towards getting stolen) and have an unlimited hosting (which comes with $3 per month as well). This was if someone eats up your domain bandwidth (for images), your main site will still run. With an unlimited bandwidth, even the image server should not stop anyway. (Though I haven’t seen bandwidth over message for quite sometime, may be I see 1 or 2 in a year).
Other points, copyright etc
I am not sure on how it can protect the copyright issues? As people can generally copy the image and host it on their server anyway. The game websites are copying the games from the providers and hosting it on their own servers to get the SEO advantage. (They are not thinking of bandwidth protection anyway). Also from the SEO perspective, there are various cases (pointed out webmasters) that hotlinking does harm to them as the other website starts ranking for the image embedded from their website. I am not sure of it though. As I feel, google should understand that every embed is nothing by a link to the original source. The difficulty comes up when there is a copy of the image and then uploading it on a different server (Google will have to do image scanning + checking the documents to see the original source).
Why I recommend hotlinking
I recommend it for following reasons (apart from the above points):
- It makes easy for another webmaster to refer to us, so more embeds can happen
- It allows me to see who all are embeding it and thus I can approach them to add a referral for my image
- Many of the webmaster add a referral anyway (Each referral adds up a natural link, highly valued by Google and Google ranking is money)
- Also I feel that some day Google will consider embed to be a link (even more powerful than a link) for image optimization.
Last 2 cents: You may liked to have your copyright statement within the image (with the domain name @domain.com) for marketing advantage + copyright protection.
These are just viewpoints. Application is your call!
