fifeclub — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:54:23 +0000

For a while I didn't mind. I'm not in any business so I don't benefit, but itt's not causing me any bandwidth problems. And nobody is hotlinking that I know of so that's not the problem. But until earlier this year I didn't realize just how much it was happening from all over the world.

I suppose the biggest reason why I want to stop it is the creepiness factor. This is a very weird search term that I've never actually seen in my tracking, but it is a perfect illustration of the situation. I was searching Google images just this week and 13 or the 20 images results on the first page are from my website. Only 2 are related to my search terms in any way, but the thing that concerns me the most is that 4 of the photos are of my newborn baby daughter!!! That's just creepy. I don't like that.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=zhI&resnum=0&q=DISC+GOLF+ANTIPIXEL&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

I tried to stop in with that robots.txt code I posted above but after 6 months nothing changed. Is my robots code correct? Do I need different code for every country tld?

webwiz — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:52:59 +0000

Like others here, I am unsure exactly as to what your motives might be. However, once captured by Google, it may be some time before they come back and take note of your robots.txt file, although Google does respect your wishes here. (Unlike some search engines, I hear.)

To frustrate visitors who use Google's captured links, you can always move your images to a different folder. Better check all your links, though! Mscreashuns has the right idea for limiting access - you may like to read a bit more about the technique, and how you can adapt it to your needs, on this article on Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention at A List Apart.

teammatt3 — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 02:49:06 +0000

If you don't mind me asking, why do you want to stop Google from indexing your images when you're getting traffic from it? Image traffic isn't usually high quality stuff, but it's better than nothing.

fifeclub — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:29:24 +0000

I've had all my images protected for years. I'm not 100% sure exactly how Hot Link protection works but I think the search engines are indexing images and saving compressed copies on their servers, not hot linking to the files.

mscreashuns — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:13:28 +0000

From what I have read, a robots.txt file may not be sufficient, and it certainly will not be sufficient right away. It will not produce any major results at least until the next time your site is crawled by Google.

In addition to the robots.txt file, updating your .htaccess file (if possible) may provide a solution. I don't have a lot of knowledge on the use of the .htaccess file, but to forbid hotlinking of your images uses the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]

Or, if you want to just prevent google.com from hotlinking, try something like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?google\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]