What is hotlinking files

This involves adding a few lines of code into the. Unless you specify otherwise, the hotlink will display an error page in place of your image. This article offers a good overview of how that process works, and this tool generates a customized. It even lets you assign an alternative image to display instead of the blocked hotlinked image. This runs the risk of your website being banned or downgraded by Google and other search engines, meaning that your web pages may disappear from search results, severely impacting your traffic.

One way around this is to include exceptions in your code , so that Google and other search engines and social media sites, for example are still allowed to display your original image. The aforementioned. Return to Academy Home. Monitor Resolve Takedown Register Integrations.

About Press Partners. To avoid this problem, don't link to files on servers that don't belong to you. To share images and files on your own web page, upload them to your own server's directory or to a free image hosting service that allows direct linking.

Why should I stop hotlinking? Hotlinking can have a lot of undesirable consequences. One is the so-called "switcheroo". If you've linked to an image on someone's server, what's to prevent them from changing the image you linked to? If you notice a spike in traffic on your site, then dig into your site analytics.

If you discover that a large portion of your traffic is coming from only a few sites, then they could be hotlinking images or other files on your site. In that case, you can rename the files, issue a takedown request, or block their IP address.

Blocking their IP address could be the final strike if a site repeatedly hotlinks an image or ignores a takedown request. Taking steps to prevent hotlinking on your website can not only protect the integrity of your brand and ensure you get due credit over your images and other media objects — it can also save your bandwidth from accidental or intentional abuse and ensure you get the traffic you deserve.

Originally published Jan 6, AM, updated January 12 Logo - Full Color. Contact Sales. Overview of all products. Marketing Hub Marketing automation software.

Service Hub Customer service software. CMS Hub Content management system software. Operations Hub Operations software. App Marketplace Connect your favorite apps to HubSpot. Why HubSpot? Marketing Sales Service Website. Subscribe to Our Blog Stay up to date with the latest marketing, sales, and service tips and news. Thank You! You have been subscribed. Start free or get a demo. This article will highlight ways you can avoid hotlinking another website's assets if you are a web user and how to protect against hotlinking if you are a website owner.

As a website user you should always try to avoid hotlinking assets from other websites. Doing so helps ensure that the original owner of the asset won't incur unnecessary charges and that the asset that you link to won't be unaccessible given that the owner implements hotlink protection or removes the asset.

The following are a couple of solutions for avoiding hotlinking. In both cases, ensure that you have the proper authority to use someone else's assets e. If an image on your website is being referenced somewhere else, thus consuming your bandwidth, you can implement hotlink protection. This allows only specific referrers to access your assets.

The following sections shows how to achieve this protection both with Nginx and Apache.