Nothing is worse than someone stealing your images or bandwidth, but this happens fairly regularly as everything is out in the open on the internet for people to easily link to. This can cost you money and is even illegal if the person is linking to photos that you had to purchase a license to use. Today we are going to explain what hotlinking is, why Introducing WordPress it is bad, and how you can prevent hotlinking on your WordPress website.
- What is Hotlinking?
- Why Hotlinking Is Bad?
- Does Hotlinking Affect Your SEO?
- How to Prevent Hotlinking
- How to File a DMCA Notice
What is Hotlinking?
The concept of hotlinking is very simple. Find an image on the Internet somewhere and use the image URL directly on your site. This image will be displayed on your website, but it will be served from the original location. This is very convenient for the hotlinker, but it is actually theft, as you are using the resources of the site you hotlinked to. It is as if australia email list we were to get into our car and drive around on gas that we siphoned off of our neighbor’s car.
Why Hotlinking Is Bad?
Here are some things to keep in mind when it comes to hotlinking:
1. Hotlinking Costs the Original Website Owner Money
Someone linking to your images from their website may not seem like a big deal, but it could incur a lot of extra costs for you. The Oatmeal is a great example. The Huffington Post hotlinked a cartoon of theirs that consisted of multiple images. Since we’re talking about a major publication with a lot of traffic, this incurred a ton of extra costs for The Oatmeal, as thousands of people were being served the images. In a classic The Oatmea move, Matthew Introducing WordPress Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, replaced all of the hotlinked files with the following:
He also took it upon himself to replace the last image with a drawing of a butt and a pee-pee “pee-pee.” Amazing! But as you can see, the costs can add up very quickly, especially if a high-traffic site is the one hotlinking your content. Do you with a southwesterly want to trust that all writers and bloggers know how to properly use images? Probably not. And that’s why hotlink protection exists.
Related Article: WordPress Content Scraping (Fight It or Ignore It?)
2. Hotlinking is Illegal in Most Cases
Hotlinking is actually illegal in many south africa numbers cases. Why? Because many of the photos you see on the web have licensing restrictions attached to them. Here are a couple of common image licensing restrictions on popular stock photo sites.