prevent google/bing/yahoo hotlinking/direct link to images
 

what are you using to prevent the TGPs google, yahoo, and bing from hotlinking and directing surfers straight to single images? Is there a plugin for wordpress to do this? And how would I do this in htaccess for non-wp sites?

If you're using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin there's an option in permalink settings "Redirect attachment URL's to parent post URL.

htaccess method

add

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|pn g|pdf|css)$ - [F]

where domain.com is replaced with your domain

can also be used for wp and non wp sites alike.

I do some places, probably easier to just use the htaccess posted though, thanks for the reply anyway. Also, sent you a PM here a few days back if you could have a butcher's at it :thumbsup

Nice one, cheers mate :thumbsup

** actually just tried this and it's not preventing bing from displaying my image, nor redirecting when the image is clicked on :Oh crap

heh, and this didn't work either, presumably because I ftp my images, rather than use wp attachments thingo

How does that combine w/ what WP normally puts in the .htaccess file? I tried adding it and it made my whole site go 501 Server Error on me. Ugh.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://anyothersite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://anyothersite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.anyothersite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.anyothersite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.yoursite.com/index.html [R,NC]

it may be that bing is displaying your image from it's cache.

also here is a handy htaccess generator for stopping hotlinking
http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/

try

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|flv|swf|png|pdf|css)$ - [F]

place it after the standard wp code in the htaccess file

I see that a lot of images on Google Image Search get like transparent blacked out and force you to visit the website to view the images...how do you do this??

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.jpg$

Slightly modified, but should be the exact same thing in terms of what it does I *think*

does the job with bing as far as the redirect, but not for google :Oh crap

can't remember the url now, but a script that if you're as thick as me with script stuff etc your head will explode at :thumbsup

You were quoting pinkz.

What I posted works for both Bing and Google no problem.

nah pinkz was different, I used yours, just used the single line instead of http|www|domain.com

I'll try again with your exact one in case I've fucked something up which is most likely the case if you say yours works in both :thumbsup

magnetron, nope, that doesn't prevent hotlinking in google, nor does it redirect when clicking 'view image', just sends straight to the full size image url :(

Try clearing your cookies before checking your images in Google, cuz it does work.

And if it still doesn't work for you, I'm at a loss to explain why.

What am I saying? Clear out your History.

I'm clicking on the 'view image' link in google, which is linked to the image url - that's what I want to redirect eg
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&lr...&biw=-1&bih=-1
'view image' links to the direct image url (only clicking on the pic takes you to the original page) - I want to fuck off the ability for a surfer to get taken straight to the image only.

Clear your Temporary Internet Files Folder and check again.

I meant to say this in the first place. I think I'm having a stroke.

Does this affect google and bing as they crawl and index the images?

lol :pimp

http://wp-picshield.com/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/imaguard/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-break-dance/

Nope. It limits them to only showing their crappy snapshots of your full size images.

But if you don't clear out the full size images and page files that were cached during previous searches, they'll just end up being reloaded in your browser and the Hotlink Protection will appear to be an unsuccessful.

I'm doing a new search, clicking a new image. The given link is going to stay the same ie domain.com/a-or-b-or-c-path-to-image.jpg

as bizarre as it sounds, I got it working by adding /index.php to my domain instead of leaving it at domain.com

redirect works fine now, thanks very much Magnetron :thumbsup

Awesome.

This may get your site penalized by Google. Read this: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-m...tch-17631.html

What will this do exactly?

I have lots of bing image searches and wonder how I can get the surfer to land on my website's page (that contains the image they clicked on in the bing search results) instead of seeing the single image in bing's results.

Search engines will only show surfers crappy thumbs of your images. When surfers try to access the full size versions, they are redirected to your page. Anyone hot linking your images can hijack your results, but you can still get surfers redirected to your site.

Best to turn off protection so all your images are properly indexed. Protection seems to hinder Google Bots, etc.

For that first part you wrote (above) do you mean when they 'click' on the thumb?

For that second part you wrote, how do you turn off protection?

Thanks :)

Yes, it absolutely will. There's a trade off you have to make here. If they're going to put your image in their search results, it's obviously not in their interest to put images that won't open up in their search results. They've also dealt with plenty of shenanigans in the past with cloaking, so even if you get away with some form now, know it's something they consider for your long term strategy. Cloaking of any sort is fucking tricky. They detect it all easily but it's really hard to predict. Redirecting to the page with the image on it was always a bad idea, but lots of people do it without that metric putting them over any tipping point. At the same time, the next update could change the weight of some other metric and all the sudden you're actually flagged and that's fucked.

I really think before anybody does this though, they should crunch numbers on their server logs. Hotlink protection is meant to keep some dickhead from embedding images in his site to leech your bandwidth. If you allow Google to hotlink, they're hosting your thumbnail so at least when you do use up some bandwidth it's a prequalified click. They're also providing a direct link to the image (which is already cached), but they're also giving a free link to your page. Calculate what you spend on bandwidth vs. dollars earned from that traffic if you really want to decide.

Now what I personally would just always do to keep the image search traffic but keep other dickheads from leeching

That returns a 403 (forbidden). You can do a 302 to a "no hotlinking" image, but 302 literally means "found" and is treated as a promise that the server is sending you to the requested content. I just wouldn't, because to the algorithm that's intentional deception.

Just to be a little clearer, this was what I was talking about in my post with the 302 redirects. If you mean you want it to hit your page on the thumbnail click you just can't do that. There's always going to be a hotlink there. If you want the direct image link to redirect to the page with the image, it's easy to do assuming each image is associated with a single page, but you need server side code and it's both very very blackhat and very very detectable.

The thumbs or the view image links.

In the case of some douche hijacking your image, the thumb will send surfers to his site while the view image links will still redirect surfers to your site.

Some hosting control panels like cPanel have a Hotlink Protection option. You add in only the sites you want to display your images ( including your own and don't forget to include your numerical address as well ) and turn it on. It automatically rewrites your .htaccess file with a code similar to what I posted. Turn it off, it restores your .htaccess to normal.

Otherwise, to do it manually - download your .htaccess file, save an original copy, rewrite the other. Upload the rewritten copy to activate HP. Upload the original copy when you want HP deactivated.

1- Why?

2- How are they giving out a free link? All I see is a search result link, same as what you'd get if you a did a web search and one of my sites was listed?

I'm not sure yet if I'll do this. Google threatening to penalize is getting to be less and less of a threat all the time since they are always decreasing affiliate's traffic anyway.