Free Website Marketing! Try Hotlinked-Image
More often than not, a great deal of efforts is put to write articles. Doesn’t it just piss you off when you see them appear on other sites without your knowledge?
I don’t mind if they quote a portion of it, and link it back to the original article. In fact, I’ll even encourage that. Call it ethics, or manners, that’s how Internet is supposed to work.
But no. These people just copy the whole chunk outright, and don’t even bother to give a link back to your site. Some will even go as far as claiming it as their own. Worse even, Google might rank them higher for the same content, the very article they steal from you.
For the past few days I have spent some time tracking contents stolen from my site. Some sites I emailed to are very cooperative, but not all of them are.
This picture below shows post by a forum owner using content from here.
I’m still looking for some ways to solve this as quickly as possible, specially those that also hotlink directly to the images. Not only they use my contents, but also my server bandwidth. So, what should I do? For now, I only think of one thing. At least this will give me some time to cool down while looking around for solution.
I changed the file name of the pictures and change my article to link it back. Then, I created some picture promoting my website and name it according to the original filename. This way, sites that hotlink to the image will display these new pictures. And I get some free marketing.
Adios
Cheatad ! SEO, Google Adsense & Technolgy Blog
What you should do is provide your picture via a php script. If the request is your site, show your content otherwise show the ad. You can do this only if the REFERER have been accessing your site more than a few time, so the person linking does not even know about it
You’re still picking up the bandwidth bill though. Another approach is to edit your server’s .htaccess file to just refuse the image request from someone else’s server.
That’s a good idea, but you could also use your .htaccess file to prevent things from being hotlinked as well, and than use one generic image to be shown on the hotlinking sites. This is a artivle on it if you are hosted on a linux server and have apache …(http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2004/11/stop-image-hotlinking-tutorial-htaccess-apache)
One way you can get around this is to serve your images via PHP script. The PHP script would check the domain of the referring page, and if it is adsensecheats.com, it would serve the image fine. But if the domain is something else, it would either display a generic ‘adsensecheats.com’ image, or else it would display a ‘branded’ copy of the image (this could be done dynamically).
I haven’t actually done this myself, but I have heard of it being done, and it was a topic I researched while working on an image repository and training system for Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
Hope this helps.
Hi, thanks all.
I’m going to try the php script thingy, but I’m new in php, so might take some time to learn.
I’ve had a similar experience, but decided to use another approach, to shame the guy into submission. I tried contacting friendster.com, but have yet to recieve a response.
I posted about it here: http://www.koudal.dk/hotlink-revenge-dont-steal-bandwidth
Actually that article was posted by my friend on http://www.thila.ropage.com/ and he informed me about this article
and than i posted that article on http://desi-tek.com . I was not aware about the origin of the content. i just modified that article and added your name and your site url in source. And i apologise for not adding source as i was not aware.
and codding it with php is not a complete sollution as any 1 can save that page upload images on any image hosting site and than any body can publish it on that site.
i mean their site
serving them your ads and paying for the bandwidth isn’t so bad at all. Since I did it on MySpace accounts who were sucking my bandwidth by hotlinking to images my traffic has increased somewhat significantly…
i just never liked paying for their visual enjoyment lol.
Great stuff, one more for the good guys
Dont’ get even get advertising.
use a .htaccess file – much easier. eg:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?YOURWEBSITE\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?SOMEALLOWEDWEBSITE\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/blogpics/bandwidththeft.jpe [L]
The first line obviously means you don’t block your own site, the second is an example of adding another website to allow them to hotlink your images, and that last line determines which type of files are blocked and the image that is displayed instead when someone tries to hotlink one of those files (note extension is .jpe).
Save this file as .htaccess (yes, it starts with a .) and place it in your main directory – anything in that directory (including other directories within it) will be dealt with.
bah.. didn’t display very well. first line:
RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?YOURWEBSITE\.com/ [NC]
next line:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?SOMEALLOWEDWEBSITE\.com/ [NC]next line:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$next line:
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /path relative to htaccess file/ALTERNATEIMAGE.jpe [L]AMEN Brother! Damn I wish I had read this before leaving my comment on the “Social Media Post” because just reading this now has my mind working at 160mph.
Great. Hope this post is useful for you and others as well…