.: On Hotlink Protection? ::.

[tuXian]

I have the option in my webhosting CPanel called ' HotLink Protection'. Its description goes like this:

HotLink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified below) on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don't specify below (ie. html files). An example of hotlinking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from your site from somewhere else on the net. The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth. You should ensure that all sites that you wish to allow direct links from are in the list below. This system attempts add all sites it knows you own to the list, however you may need to add others.


Now the question is if I enable it though it will help me solve the bandwidth stealing issue but are there any disadvantages to it?

Someone said me the search engines wont cache the site if its enabled.

someone please enlighten me!

[sr_ultimate]

...search engines wont cache the site...

Well i don`t think it is so `cause search engine as far as I think caches the page not the images and files : )

[tuXian]

May be the page will be cached without images... what do u say? Or all thats wrong and hotlink wont cause any harm.

[SmoothCriminal]

aaha.. who said dat ur site wont be cached by Search engines? Dude.. its an altogether diff process.

To disable HotLinking you need to edit ur .htaccess.. and just allow access to "image" files (.gif, .jpg) etc to sites like google etc.. so its very flexible and u can choose which all sites to allow.. and which all u dont wanna allow..

So, in short its really ridiculous to say dat preventing hotlinking affects PR..

[Deep]

Originally Posted by SmoothCriminal

aaha.. who said dat ur site wont be cached by Search engines? Dude.. its an altogether diff process.

To disable HotLinking you need to edit ur .htaccess.. and just allow access to "image" files (.gif, .jpg) etc to sites like google etc.. so its very flexible and u can choose which all sites to allow.. and which all u dont wanna allow..

So, in short its really ridiculous to say dat preventing hotlinking affects PR..

actually if the person who is smart will still be enable to display images using google as referrer...

for example..

if you allow images for say google...
so your images will be displayed in google and the source of the image will be...

http://images.google.com/images?q=tb....com/image.gif

so smart person will put the same source in his page too and since the referer is google so image will be displayed


now coming back to the main question...

Originally Posted by tuxian

Now the question is if I enable it though it will help me solve the bandwidth stealing issue but are there any disadvantages to it?

yes it will save the bandwidth for sure but enable only if someone is already stealing your images..otherwise no need to enable it...

or anyways if you want to enable it then do it..no harm in it...

cheers
Deep

[SmoothCriminal]

@Deep: If thye're that smart u really cant do anything abt it.. can u?.. u cant hide ur resources from search engines also na..

Or make it simple why do u need Images to be indexed by google?... esp for most non-tecnical sites.. so we can safely put a "*" for images, restricting access to all other sites inc google..

[tuXian]

hey make this first clear to me, if a an image is not indexed then how will it be visible in page cache? The page cache will just show the page without images.

Am I right? Please correct me if Im wrong.

[SmoothCriminal]

Yup.. u r rite.. if u restrcit.. then images alone wont get Indexed.. Text wud be cached..

For example see this.. this site has put a script to show a 'DONT HOT LINK" button whenver some1 hot-links.. even google\.. Here's google cache page:

http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache...in+co.nr&hl=en