How to trace hot-linking

Richard · August 1, 2006

Is there any way to find out who is hot-linking to some of my images? I am seeing hits on medium and large versions of about half a dozen pics but no thumbs at all in those galleries, so I assume that someone is hot-linking. Since the reference is directly to the image and not a gallery page Statcounter and Google Analytics do not help. I am nowhere near my bandwidth limit, so it is not really a problem. I am just damn curious to know who is using my images and for what purpose.

Thanks,

James S · August 1, 2006

You can make it so that is not allowed.

Richard · August 1, 2006

rex wrote:

You can make it so that is not allowed.

Yes, I understand that. But I am more interested in finding out who is doing it and why. Mostly it is curiosity, but there is also the off chance that it could lead to some commercial arrangement.

ScottMcLeod · August 1, 2006

Call the subjects, or organizers of the event?

Google the filename?

uhh... if you have the IP and other (website) addresses, there's ways of tracking things back.

Richard · August 1, 2006

ScottMcLeod wrote:

Call the subjects, or organizers of the event?

Google the filename?

uhh... if you have the IP and other (website) addresses, there's ways of tracking things back.

Well, that's the problem. I don't have any IP or other data. All I have is the hitcount in the Smugmug stats. Since the images are being linked to directly, the Statcounter and Google Analytics code doesn't ever hit the browser, so there's no trail for me to follow.

These are not event pics, just street shots mostly. As I said in the beginning, this is not really a problem so far. If bandwidth does become an issue, I know what to do to cut them off. I am just a hobbiest and don't think I have anything worth trying to sell yet. But I would at least like to see that I am getting an appropriate photo credit. It doesn't seem like too much to ask.

docwalker · August 1, 2006

Richard,

I have had some luck using http://wholinkstome.com/

Enter in the URL you have identified and you might be able to see if a search engine has indexed the link.

Doc

docwalker · August 1, 2006

Also look at Google under the advanced search. Enter your URL in the "link" field. It will also tell you if google has indexed a link to you. Be sure to search for both your SM site and Custom domain if you have on.

Richard · August 1, 2006

docwalker wrote:

Also look at Google under the advanced search. Enter your URL in the "link" field. It will also tell you if google has indexed a link to you. Be sure to search for both your SM site and Custom domain if you have on.

Thanks Doc. Wholinkstome didn't tell me anything that I didn't know already. Google did not return anything when using the complete URL, though it does seem to have just about all my images indexed when I give it site:rsinmadrid.smugmug.com.

Actually, the Google behavior seems to be rather strange. When I click on one of the images in Google the Google results, I get the right image in the Google cache, but then something seems to be redirecting the query to a different image in Smugmug. However, it is still one of my complete pages, and so my monitoring stuff picks it up.

Curiouser and curiouser...

scratch

docwalker · August 1, 2006

Richard,

What is the image URLs? I might be able to look around a bit and see what I can find.
Have you ever posted them to Dgrin? PM them to me if you want to keep them private.

bwg · August 1, 2006

rsinmadrid wrote:

Thanks Doc. Wholinkstome didn't tell me anything that I didn't know already. Google did not return anything when using the complete URL, though it does seem to have just about all my images indexed when I give it site:rsinmadrid.smugmug.com.

Actually, the Google behavior seems to be rather strange. When I click on one of the images in Google the Google results, I get the right image in the Google cache, but then something seems to be redirecting the query to a different image in Smugmug. However, it is still one of my complete pages, and so my monitoring stuff picks it up.

Curiouser and curiouser...scratch

the pain in the butt thing is that you cant exclude domains on the link thing

it would be great if you could exclude smugmug.com for a link search like:

link:rsnmadrid.smugmug.com -site:smugmug.com

but alas, no such luck.

Richard · August 1, 2006

docwalker wrote:

Richard,

What is the image URLs? I might be able to look around a bit and see what I can find.
Have you ever posted them to Dgrin? PM them to me if you want to keep them private.

Here's one that I am pretty certain I never posted on Dgrin

http://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/photos/14925949-M.jpg

This was the URL I got by right clicking and saving the image location.

The photo in its gallery location is http://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/gallery/475417/16/14925949

So far today, it is showing 83 hits, while the gallery itself only shows 4 tiny and 0 thumbs. Since stats just rolled over, these are interesting numbers.

Thanks for your help.

docwalker · August 1, 2006

Richard,

One thing I found is that if you do a search by the image id number in google you will get the -Th. It is possible that someone is searching for Train Station images and is finding it that way.

You got a few clicks just now from me so do not be suprised by the spike.

You are also getting links from www.smugmug.com/keyword/train/
and www.smugmug.com/keyword/station

Some of your photos are tagged at http://tagcentral.net/tag/europa/ also at http://tagcentral.net/?tag=madrid&submit=Get+Tag

I did not see the train station but it appears that the list refreshes quickly. This is a possible candidate.

I just checked an some of mine are there as well.... So this is definitely a source. tagcentral.net

Richard · August 1, 2006

docwalker wrote:

Richard,

One thing I found is that if you do a search by the image id number in google you will get the -Th. It is possible that someone is searching for Train Station images and is finding it that way.

You got a few clicks just now from me so do not be suprised by the spike.

You are also getting links from www.smugmug.com/keyword/train/
and www.smugmug.com/keyword/station

Some of your photos are tagged at http://tagcentral.net/tag/europa/ also at http://tagcentral.net/?tag=madrid&submit=Get+Tag

I did not see the train station but it appears that the list refreshes quickly. This is a possible candidate.

I just checked an some of mine are there as well.... So this is definitely a source. tagcentral.net

Doc,

I know that I get some traffic from TagCentral and also from Smugmug keywords.

But today there are about half a dozen pics that are getting much more traffic than anything else on my site, and the numbers--while not identical--seem to increasing at about the same rate. Which makes me think that they are probably being linked to from the same page. Searches and other referrals would be more randomly distributed, I think. This is what has peaked my interest.

Thanks a lot for poking around. I appreciate it.

Regards,

docwalker · August 1, 2006

I had no clue about tag central until today. It was a good exercise to find it. Thanks.

If this is something linked today, it may not show up in the search engines for a few days. I would keep checking. Eventually one of the search engines might pick it up. It is also possible that the forum has a robots.txt that blocks the search engines. In that case you may never find out what is causing it.

Can you see what area that the service provider is coming from or is that blocked as well?

I see a lot of blocked referrer traffic on my site using Statcounter. Depending on the photos they are looking at there is some concern. Other than shutting down access and setting passwords I am at a loss.

Richard · August 1, 2006

docwalker wrote:

If this is something linked today, it may not show up in the search engines for a few days. I would keep checking.

Good point. That hadn't occurred to me.

docwalker wrote:

Can you see what area that the service provider is coming from or is that blocked as well?

I will do some more serious analysis tomorrow when I have data from Google Analytics, but I would be willing to bet that nothing will show up. I'm not a Web geek so this might be utterly mistaken, but I think that any site can include an image tag with the source pointed to my image locations. As long as external linking is enabled, my image will appear on the rogue page. Since my Smugmug page is never shown, none of the Statcounter or GA code ever reaches the browser, and I get no information. Please correct me if I am missing something here. I don't know whether anything hits the Smugmug server that could be used to trace back to the server the page came from.

docwalker wrote:

I see a lot of blocked referrer traffic on my site using Statcounter. Depending on the photos they are looking at there is some concern. Other than shutting down access and setting passwords I am at a loss.

Yes, I have seen a large increase in traffic with the referrer blocked in the past month. I am also curious about that. On the other hand, at least those referrals end up on my site, so I get bit of exposure.

WaterfallRich · August 1, 2006

Most of the problems I've had with hotlinking to my images on my website come from forums or blogs (like MySpace) that allow hotlinking. The poster wants to include an image in the post, so they hotlink without giving any credit to where they stole the photo from. Every time someone else opens the page with that post and image, it counts as a hit against my bandwidth. I used to be able to track some of them down if my stats showed the link to the particular thread, but most times the stats linked only to an index page like //:profile.myspace.com/index.cfm

Could be the same problem you are having. My web host now offers htaccess blockage, so now all the thieves get is a red x.

troutstreaming · August 3, 2006

Similar story from two months ago for me.
I noticed a smiliar pattern on one of my images several months ago with 200+ medium hits a day on a single image with no corresponding traffic in statcounter/google analytics/ nor my header image. I just took the image plopped an even bigger and more obvious watermark with copyright, my name and my website address on it and used the replace image option to tag the image. I figured that anyplace that could get me a couple of hundred medium views a day on a single image day after day would be a good place to advertise my work at. The hit behaviour continued for a couple more weeks before it tapered off. I was never able to track it down using any of the search tools I was familiar worth, nor did anyone ever send me a 'saw your image on ... and I want to buy it' message, so it remains a mystery.

Andy

How to trace hot-linking

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