Does this matter? spammy image links eg: sites loading our images on their spammy domains

[plahpoy]

This post is deleted!

[ThompsonPaul]

Google's generally pretty good at recognising this kind of hot-linked image use by spammy sites is not intended to be manipulative by the site owner.

The most direct solution, both to be safe and to keep other sites from abusing your bandwidth/server resources is to block hot-linking of images like this altogether. Is there any legit situation where you need to allow other sites to embed your images? If not, a blocking rule in htaccess will break all those existing spam links (easier than disavowing) and stop cold any new ones from being automatically created.

Would that work in your situation?

Paul

[plahpoy]

No reason off the top of my head.

The existing years worth of links would still exist though, even if they are broken... and I too would think Google would recognize this. However our rank correlates almost exactly with the addition and disavow of these. First time this has ever affected one of our sites.

Without rtm :), do you think disabling the hotlinking  have any effect on results in goog.images, social, sharing etc?

Thanks,

Zach

[plahpoy]

I also just realized that these are not just images being hotlinked. It seems that on each page with the hotlinked images there is also an actual link with an anchor of "." being used.