After having a quick peek (as you do) on Yahoo Site Explorer to check the backlinks for one of my blogs I noticed a back link from a related blog.
Lovely I thought, lets go and see what this blog has to say about my site/post.
Shock Horror. The cheeky sod had not only stolen my image but reproduced the post word for word.
Now I know that this happens all the time and was not that bothered as when this type of content stealing has happened to me before and the type of sites that have nicked my content have never really benefited from it as Google will only see it as duplicate content.
Also having asked for it to be removed has usually fell on deaf ears.
But then I looked a bit closer at the image on the infringing blog and noticed that the blogger was actually serving the image from my own WordPress upload folder.
This started me thinking about bandwith issues, so I did a quick search on G and it appears that this method of serving images is called Image Hotlinking.
So this guy is not only stealing my content but also my bandwith.
Then I thought about any SEO benefits for my site that this hotlinking of images may bring about.
After a bit more research it seems that the consensus of opinion is that:
- Google may up your SERPs for that particular image in their Image Search Results
- Google may see that other people like what you have on your site and pass some authority to the domain
So my take on this is if you are not having a bandwith issue then let the images ride.
Who knows you may be getting a bit of juice from the sites hotlinking to your images.
But in the end I was still a bit incensed with this particular blogger stealing my copy for his own benefits.
He is in direct competition with my blog review site and I felt he needed a polite warning.
So I renamed the image, reloaded the post and changed the original.
His post now looks like this:
Update28.06.2011
The pic is still there.
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