Dealing with Image bandwidth Thieves to your Link Building Advantage
This post will help you manage people who are hotlinking to your images, to your advantage. You can actually use the bandwidth thieves to your advantage by changing the way you upload the pictures.
Are you not tired of seeing new incoming links on your dashboard only to find out that someone link to your picture without giving any credit, and it is just an image hotlink?
I have a blog with a relevant picture on every posts, and since the picture are relevant, I rank very well in google Image search. Well, and I get a new hotlink almost everyday. Sometimes more.
Earlier, I used to mail to leave a comment to at least provide an img source so that I get a link back to my site. They usually don't listen. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they just remove the picture. And I can't go around leaving comments.
Then I realised something.
Understand this:
Image bandwidth thieves are a Lazy Lot.
They could have uploaded the image to their own posts/articles, but they were too lazy to do that. Most of them are blogspot users, and have no dearth of bandwidth.
And just because they are lazy, they just copy the image link source code.
So how do you use it to your advantage?
Usually when we upload a photo on a blog, the code is like img src the image url and then the image links back to the same image using an HREF.
Something like
And the hotlinker usually copies the whole lot.. This is where we can use it to our advantage.
So what I have done is is I changed the href part to link back to the webpage and not the image... SO that the image links back to the webpage or blogpost url and not the image placeholder in WP-UPLOAD directory.
The above code now looks like:
The net result?
80% of my hotlinkers link back to my site, though without an anchor text.
But I use the ALT attribute wisely.
The picture are relevant to my Post or Page and usually the article that is hotlinking is also relevant to my original article, and I get some link juice..
Happy Link Building
Are you not tired of seeing new incoming links on your dashboard only to find out that someone link to your picture without giving any credit, and it is just an image hotlink?
I have a blog with a relevant picture on every posts, and since the picture are relevant, I rank very well in google Image search. Well, and I get a new hotlink almost everyday. Sometimes more.
Earlier, I used to mail to leave a comment to at least provide an img source so that I get a link back to my site. They usually don't listen. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they just remove the picture. And I can't go around leaving comments.
Then I realised something.
Understand this:
Image bandwidth thieves are a Lazy Lot.
They could have uploaded the image to their own posts/articles, but they were too lazy to do that. Most of them are blogspot users, and have no dearth of bandwidth.
And just because they are lazy, they just copy the image link source code.
So how do you use it to your advantage?
Usually when we upload a photo on a blog, the code is like img src the image url and then the image links back to the same image using an HREF.
Something like
And the hotlinker usually copies the whole lot.. This is where we can use it to our advantage.
So what I have done is is I changed the href part to link back to the webpage and not the image... SO that the image links back to the webpage or blogpost url and not the image placeholder in WP-UPLOAD directory.
The above code now looks like:
The net result?
80% of my hotlinkers link back to my site, though without an anchor text.
But I use the ALT attribute wisely.
The picture are relevant to my Post or Page and usually the article that is hotlinking is also relevant to my original article, and I get some link juice..
Happy Link Building
Labels: image-seo, link-building
posted at 7:51 PM
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