Questions tagged [hotlinking]

Hotlinking is when you directly use (e.g. embed/display/link) a file (such as an image, movie, audio file, flash animation, or any other digital asset) that is hosted on another site.

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18 votes
2 answers
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Hotlinking: what is it, and why shouldn't people do it?

What exactly is hotlinking? And why do people say you shouldn't do it?
11 votes
2 answers
9k views

How do you hot link an external image from a Media Wiki site?

What is the syntax for showing an externally hosted image in a media wiki page? The media wiki help page doesn't seem to cover that scenario. I've tried several things that don't work: [http://...
Stephen Ostermiller's user avatar
8 votes
5 answers
3k views

Is in-line linking (hot linking) photos and videos OK on my website, or is it unfair to the site which hosts them?

I am interested in hearing the community's thoughts about "in-line linking". That is, the act of embedding photo/video/written content into a particular website via code, such that a website can ...
Peter R.B.'s user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
402 views

Htaccess Hotlinking Prevention: Exclude a specific image from rule

I have a working hotlinking prevention in the .htaccess. Everything works fine. However, I use an image of my website in email signature. After the hotlinking prevention, this image is now displayed ...
dajana.s's user avatar
  • 161
5 votes
2 answers
296 views

Prevent Google from listing hotlinked images for other sites

I am hosting several domains on my server and hotlink images accross various domains. However, I have found out that in Google searches, the images are listed as originating on the site where the ...
richey's user avatar
  • 285
5 votes
2 answers
971 views

Is it bad to hotlink images hosted on googleusercontent.com?

When copy-pasting content from Google Docs into our CMS, images are hotlinked to lh3.googleusercontent.com. Most images on that page (except the first one) are linked in this way. Is there any ...
Rob's user avatar
  • 106
5 votes
3 answers
487 views

How do I get watermarked versions of images indexed in Google search but allow users to see clean high quality images once on my site?

I have a site where much of the focus are the images themselves. When people visit the website directly (with an AdSense ad shown), the image shows in normal high-quality. When robots visit the ...
Mike -- No longer here's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
2k views

How is anti-hotlinking done?

In website terms, hotlinking is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site ...
Lazer's user avatar
  • 141
4 votes
2 answers
10k views

How to stop access of a PHP file from other sites

I read somewhere about hot linking of images. Preventing image hot linking helps to stop bandwidth theft from your site. Would it work for a PHP file? In my case, I am using a PHP file to generate ...
Amit Kumar Gupta's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
128 views

Hotlinking to reduce bandwidth usage?

I manage two websites for a client, each hosted with a different company. One site is an eCommerce site and the other is a blog for the eCommerce site. The eCommerce site is reaching its bandwidth ...
Michael's user avatar
  • 67
4 votes
2 answers
597 views

prevent hotlinking of off-site content?

I have a www.example.com site where I serve all static content (e.g. http.//www.example.com/image.jpg) off a CDN with URLs like http://static.example.com/image.jpg An Apache 2 .htaccess rule ...
blau's user avatar
  • 143
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

Prevent image hotlinking from Amazon S3 and while allowing social networks

I'm using Amazon S3 to host some assets (mostly images) on a small project. I'm trying to find a way to prevent leeching (which can be very serious should someone tried to use a network of bots to ...
K.D.'s user avatar
  • 41
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

How to prevent hotlinking for specific domains using .htaccess?

I'm being heavily spammed by image scraper sites. There are more than 150+ domains targeting my images & sending spammed links to my site. I just want to prevent hotlinking from them. I just want ...
Ankit Jha's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
204 views

Not able to stop hotlink

I am using following htaccess code to stop hot linking my image files Options +FollowSymlinks Options +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?article-stack....
Amit Kumar Gupta's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
481 views

Block images on Russian domain .ru via htaccess?

I have a WordPress website which accepts anonymous comments and images. We are receiving spam in the form of Russian porn, with images hotlinked from websites on the Russian domain .ru As we are ...
Shaun's user avatar
  • 131
3 votes
2 answers
6k views

Image hotlinking providers? [closed]

I use a lot of images in my wordpress and due to hosting restrictions I need to host the images somewhere else and hotlink them in my blog posts. So I am looking for some reliable image host which ...
Josh's user avatar
  • 39
3 votes
1 answer
349 views

Hotlink Protection compatible with Google AMP pages

I'm trying to create HTACCESS Hotlink Protection on my site but I'd like all Google top level domains (.com., .co.in, .co.uk, etc) to be able to access my files, so that visitors to the Google AMP ...
UdegbunamChuks's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
943 views

How to preventing massive hotlinking of images before Apache?

A very popular website has begun using my Flickrshow javascript slideshow, but failed to notify me beforehand, and so is using a version that downloads the images used from my server. This is ...
beseku's user avatar
  • 131
3 votes
1 answer
432 views

How can I allow hotlinking between my own sites

I have several sites hosted on a Bluehost server. I would like my sites to be able to use each others' images. In other words, I want to let my sites hotlink images from each other. There is an ...
Paul Jones's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
1k views

Is it possible to trace the IP-address of users on Google Images viewing hot-linked images?

Is it possible to track the IP-addresses of users on Google Images viewing my photos (even though they don’t leave Google)? Since all content on Google Images is actually hot-linked, it should be ...
CrazyCrawler's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
461 views

How to avoid leeching / hotlinking files?

I use Kleeja script to host files and noticed that certain files are downloaded many more times than the site's visit counter indicates. So I assume that the files are being leeched. The web server is ...
alfish's user avatar
  • 558
1 vote
1 answer
69 views

How to deal with URLs that has been hotlinked?

My website assets have been hot linked by many other websites. I doubt whether these are responsible for the downtimes on my site. How should I deal with such links? Will deleting the links solve ...
Shan Eapen Koshy's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
3k views

Does hotlinking image protection hurt search engines indexing?

Several websites are hotlinking my images, I want to block and prevent hotlinking to my website images. And, I was going to use standard hotlink prevention code in .htaccess: RewriteEngine on ...
knilkantha's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
875 views

Is there a way to disable image hotlinking by 3rd-party sites while allowing Google Image Search

Can I block other sites from hotlinking to images on my server to preserver bandwidth while still allowing my site to stay discoverable in Google and Bing image search?
Matthew S's user avatar
  • 323
1 vote
1 answer
439 views

htaccess code to prevent hotlinking does not work as intended

I have searched a lot this topic, and found this piece of code (or slight variations) in many places, included some answers in this website. This is the code: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> ...
Ikagil's user avatar
  • 11
1 vote
3 answers
5k views

How to allow Google Images search to by pass hotlink protection?

I saw Google Images seems to index my images only if hotlink protection is off. [*] I use anyway hotlink protection because I don't like the idea of people sucking my bandwidth, i simply use this ...
Marco Demaio's user avatar
  • 6,490
1 vote
2 answers
961 views

Redirecting image hotlink to the article the image was used on; where/how to store the connecting information?

I have an app in node.js and I want to make a route that redirects all hotlinks to images to the article/URL the image was used on. But since all the images are stored in /public/img directory and ...
laggingreflex's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
582 views

If I cache an RSS feeds' html, but not the images, will this appear to be image hot-linking?

I have a simple RSS news application built using JavaScript, that pulls in feeds through Google's feed API. I'm doing a proof of concept and caching the feed using localStorage though due to storage ...
george's user avatar
  • 113
1 vote
0 answers
24 views

oEmbed and "hotlinking"

From back in the day, it was always considered "not cool" to hotlink- i.e. have your HTML reference images that someone else is hosting. I'm trying to be clear on the etiquette around oEmbed, however....
Ascendant's user avatar
  • 173
0 votes
1 answer
59 views

Impacts of Duplicate content on Second-Level-Domain aside SEO

A particular website is usually referred by the domain example.com, which is also the one which is promoted and used everywhere. But there's also example.net (in real, the hyphen in the domain name is ...
sebix's user avatar
  • 103
0 votes
2 answers
248 views

What does it mean that hosting ToS DOESN'T allows HOTLINKS and WHY is it like that? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Hotlinking: what is it, and why shouldn’t people do it? Free hosting services often doesn't allow to use hotlinks. I'm not sure if I understand it well and what is the reason of ...
Michal P.'s user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
656 views

How to track hot-linking of image types in IIS7

I don't want to block hot-linking on my site; it's not that big a deal. However, Google Analytics doesn't show me referrers to png/gif/jpg content; I don't have any statistics on the load generated ...
Mr. Smith's user avatar
  • 255
0 votes
1 answer
826 views

Amazon S3 Anti-Hotlinking Technique: Is it bad for SEO?

The technique is proposed by Amit Agarwal. He serves an HTML file through Amazon S3 for hotlinked image requests, providing a backlink to his own website. Would this have a negative effect on image ...
skibulk's user avatar
  • 253
0 votes
1 answer
144 views

Prevent hotlinking of attachments

People are able to embed my forum's attachments (vbulletin). I tried to create an htaccess rule for the hotlinking, but it did not work. RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^...
reggie's user avatar
  • 41
0 votes
1 answer
937 views

.htaccess: Redirect Hotlink Flash --> Site with embed Flash

I have some PHP sites that embeds SWF files. These SWF files are now linked to by some other guys. And I don't want them to simply open the SWF, I want them to force being redirect to the page where ...
user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
31 views

Use .htaccess to prevent image hotlinking except for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook [duplicate]

Can anyone create a .htaccess hotlinking rule for me allowing Google all domains (.com, co.uk, co.in, .au etc.) + bing.com + yahoo.com + facebook.com I would do it using online hotlink htaccess ...
Ankit Jha's user avatar