Today I was looking through one of my websites raw log files and noticed that a couple of websites are using my site images directly on their website.
Content linking adds unnecessary traffic to your website and you never get the full credit from the visitor looking at the images, in particular the site where I have all these images is a site which earns me a small amount of money from AdSense adverts and sales of my Colouring Book application.
Luckily on the One Smart Host servers we utilise ISAPI Rewrite V3 so blocking this type of content linking is very easy.
I simply added the following to my websites .htaccess file
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host}#%{HTTP:Referer} ^([^#]+)#(?!http://\1).+
RewriteRule .*\.(?:gif|jpg|png) /blocked.png [NC]
This basically only allows images to be served up from my domain www.kidscd.co.uk and if a content link is detected from another domain they are directed to the blocked.png which I have uploaded.
Have a look at the site which is linking directly to my images if you scroll half way down you should see this:
This image will now be displayed to any sites which content link directly to my images on www.kidscd.co.uk
