SEM Blog: Website Marketing Blog

What Is Hotlinking And Why Is It Bad?

Posted by Bryan at May 20th, 2008

The term "Hotlinking" may not be a familiar one to all of you, but you definitely know it’s meaning. Hotlinking is when someone uses a picture from your site directly off of your site, stealing bandwidth but at the same time redirecting spiders to the source image or users to the site of that picture when it is clicked on to view the image. Many people consider hotlinking to be in very poor taste as it can get you in a lot of trouble and often result in the link being removed and your site having a big gaping hole where your stolen picture was.

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. :)”

The only real benefit that Baker was able to prove through all this information is that your image will gain more weight in the Google Image Searches if it is properly tagged. You won’t be getting any link juice or real due credit in any trackable form unless the image is actually clickable bringing you to its full sized form hosted on your site. As people who utilize hotlinking aren’t really in it to benefit anyone, they can easily strip away your beneficial information from the image code itself.

How do you stop this? Put a watermark on all of the pictures on your site. Make it so the visitors to the linked site realize where the image comes from, reducing the likelyhood that they’ll return to that site if they see all of your images elsewhere, and increasing the chance that they’ll visit your site organically.

Don’t invest too much time into hunting down hotlinking, as your time is better spent advertising your site then hunting down those that hurt it.