Google Image Search View Image Redirect

Question

If you Google site:fansshare.com, select an image then click "View image" you won't go directly to the image ex: http://www.fansshare.com/image.jpg. Instead, they have it setup so you are redirected to the webpage the image is from. How are they doing that? I want that for my own website.

I found an old WordPress plug-in from 6 years ago called Google Breakdance but of course it doesn't work.

I used to have an old JavaScript script I would paste in the header and it would do the same thing but I found it and dusted it off and it doesn't work at least for WordPress anymore.

Answer 1

They appear to be doing some User-Agent sniffing and serving the image to Googlebot (which helps it get indexed) - this may even be a lower resolution version than the one displayed on the page. (However, not sure of the legitimacy of this? It feels like cloaking.)

However, any normal user that requests that particular image URL gets (307 temporarily) redirected to a web page that contains what looks like the same image. Although the image displayed on the page is a slightly different URL (served from their CDN by the looks). Like you say, the user is redirected - this is pretty much just a standard 1-1 URL redirect.

That would seem to be the basic principle used here.