Does an external link to an image file on my site help my SEO?

[AlexLenhoff]

I found a few websites that are displaying images from my site.  Curiously, they have also linked these images to the source image file on my website.  I found these because Moz showed these sites in my list of backlinks.  I assume that means it impacts my Domain Authority.  But does this actually help me in search engines since it's not linking to a page on my site?

[TimHolmes]

I think the following posts will cover this topic on images for seo and hot linking. I would imagine the problem you face is that it will be eating into your own servers bandwidth by serving these images for someone else.

https://moz.com/community/q/can-hotlinking-images-from-multiple-sites-be-bad-for-seo
https://moz.com/community/q/seo-issues-from-image-hotlinking
https://moz.com/community/q/images-and-seo

Cheers

Tim

[AlexLenhoff]

They are hot linking, but I was more asking about the accompanying link to the image on my site.  If it's not clear, it looks like this: