I Love The Web

Image Hotlinking, Good idea, Bad idea ?

Sep 8, 2008 SEO

I stumbled upon this humorous image. This gentleman had built a site with images hotlinked from another site and he writes to the web master complaining about the removal of the images he had hotlinked. Hotlinking refers to the use of an image on a site that is located on a different host than your own.

This used to be a big web ettiqutte faux pas. The two common reasons this practice was frowned upon are bandwidth costs and copyright infringement. I think if you are hosting your sites in South Africa the bandwidth costs will probably be closer to your concerns.

There are numerous examples of web masters discouraging this behavior including this ingenuous example where the hotlinked images are swaped with  images advertising the original site. Which led my thoughts to pupularity in page ranking.  As you may know, when you talk about page ranking, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a very relevant topic.

I know very little about SEO beyond the odd tweaking of the page headers and a plugin or two into wordpress but I spend enough time on the web to notice that hotlinking as been a relevant topic among SEO magicians. This is hardly a new topic but I really want to know from knowledgable poeple out there, is Hotlinking the web version of the ugly duclking that turned into  a beautiful swan ?

Tags: SEO