SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?

[EGOL]

More and more people are placing their images and other large files on cloud servers because they sometimes offer a cost advantage and they sometimes allow a website to load faster.

Because of this I don't think that Google is going to give a site a huge penalty if they are pulling content from a second domain.   This is being done by some of the highest quality and most popular sites on the web.

However, I think like you and have all of my images on my own domain.  Then if people are hotlinking them they will be coming from my site and I will get any credit for that - if google smiles about it, which I am not sure that they do.

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

The programmer just added another piece to this and has added;

"What I'm suggesting is like a 'symbolic' link in Unix . There are no different IP involved. Only IP will be Site B for example. We store everything on same server and virtual directory map to another folder on same server and its intranet and no visibility outside server"

While I understand what he's saying. Site B won't get the benefit of image hotlinking if it had the same images stored on its own domain and I just this since the coding specifically says "site.com/images", it's just not hiding it correctly and again, even if it does effectively hide it, is it truly invisible to Google that that is going on. And if it's not invisible, will it send off more red flags and look suspicious to Google. I really don't want to risk that. I just wonder if I'm over-reacting to this. I don't think that I am.

[EGOL]

hmmm....  To me, this sounds like moving your whole office because your trash can is full.

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

I can see your view, but the attribution is pretty important in their industry which is retail. I'm just concerned that to give image attribution over to another domain may be viewed as image hotlinking or scraping and that, as you said, they also won't get the benefit of a hotlink is someone else chooses to do the same.

[EGOL]

Right.   That's why I have all of my images on the same server as the domain.

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

I think you and I are on the same page and the same school of thought. I was just curious if there was any documented issues with being a "hotlinker" from an SEO perspective.

It loos like nothing bad will happen, but that you lose a lot of SEO benefits from having images stored locally and getting the proper attribution.

My other concern was making sure that it didn't look like their site was scraping from the other since they have thousands of products and ALL of those product images are being pulled from the other domain.

[EGOL]

It loos like nothing bad will happen, but that you lose a lot of SEO benefits from having images stored locally and getting the proper attribution.

I agree.  I don't know how much SEO benefits come from hot-linked images.  But, in case there is any benefit we have all of our images on our own domain and that requires terrabytes of BW per month.

[MarieHaynes]

Interesting question.  My gut instinct is that there is no SEO drawback to what is happening here.  There is nothing in the quality guidelines that I'm aware of that says you can't hotlink images from another site.  Now, if the content was duplicated then that's another issue.

[EGOL]

How about other people hotlinking images from your domain.  Do you think that google sees them pulling content from you via the image link and gives you a small credit for that?

I don't know the answer.  I assume that the value is low to nothing.  Do you have any ideas on this?

[GeorgiaSEOServices]

Actually, that IS the one answer I do know and that it DOES have a benefit to you if your image is being hotlinked to because Google sees it as a "vote" or the equivalent of an inbound link. I saw that on the Google Webmaster Forums.

I'm just at a quandary about the linker.

[MarieHaynes]

I was going to guess that there is a small benefit.  But really it's a guess. I would think it would count as a link.

[EGOL]

thanks for this report