Allowing Hotlinking of Pictures - SEO Advantage?

[B.Barnato]

Has anyone experimented or come to a definite conclusion with their own projects concerning allowing/disallowing hotlinking? What kind of impact does it have?

Besides the obvious advantage of gaining popularity though watermarked images of course.

If for any reason you do not want to or are not allowed to watermark the images you serve I can suggest the wordpress plugin "Watermark Hotlinked Images". This lets you impose your url or a message on to the images being displayed by the hotlinking websites.

(It costs 9 USD, I have no affiliation with this plugin)

[alias]

Bandwidth is cheap.

[B.Barnato]

Bandwidth is cheap.

It is indeed.

That being said, is the impact it might have on search engines worth my time/resources to encourage hotlinking i.e. give a copy/paste link to images for those less computer literate?

[wehateporn]

Good post!

I always allowed hotlinking as I thought it likely that Google would take it into account in their formula

Thanks for the heads-up on the plugin! I'll give it a try

[leg4]

I allow it.... and always have a fat watermark... No wimpy Watermarks.

[Black All Through]

If your images are linked to from other websites of blogs, is good, its a link back.
Google will define if the hotlink was created for good purposes or not, good as in if the image is of any possible interest.
Make sure your images are quality, custom/exclusive if possible, and that the tags are the correct keys that describe that page or the whole site, let the spiders pick up these tags with your url, thats what they are looking for, don't go over 5 words and use both alt and title.
All this helps mostly image search, but consider that in 50% of the chances who's looking for a specific image will also take a look at your website or blog.

[baddog]

I would have to suggest that there are definite benefits.

[B.Barnato]

Thanks for your input everyone!

The main problem, sites that use hotlinked pictures notoriously have low/no PR that causes your site to retain low PR.

Talking mainstream here, what about people hotlinking from forum posts?

The bodybuilding.com forums for example.

[B.Barnato]

Thanks for the heads-up on the plugin! I'll give it a try

Cool!

Let me know how it works out for you.