Hot Linking and How it Affects Your Website

Hot linking is the process of displaying any type of files on a website using a link to the files saved on any other website. By doing this the website on which the files are hosted will experience a loss in their bandwidth and money, as their files are used by external website without their knowledge or permission. This process is also known by the name bandwidth theft and is used by many webmasters to displaying files on their website without upgrading their bandwidth.

The files that are hot linked may be image files, videos or flash files and since these files consumes some bandwidth while it is loaded, most of the webmasters are not ready to upload them on their web server They do this mainly because they are not ready to spend money on upgrading their websites bandwidth and as a result they end up stealing others bandwidth. As a  a result the website on which the files are uploaded becomes slow and takes much time to download properly on the browsers, which will result in a bad user experience.

On an SEO point, due to hot linking many of the websites experience huge load time which in turn is considered as a unhealthy sign by the search engines and as a result the site may experience a search engine ranking drop. The major search engines especially Google givens enough consideration to the load time of a website and if a website load time is below the expected level, then the site would get a set back in their search engine rankings. This would certainly tamper your SEO activities.

It is also not a good option to steal and use someone’s file as it may have many negative effects on your website. If at any point of time if the webmaster of the original file changes the file name, then it would be reflected on your website. In this case the image or video area on your website would appear as a blank space, which would look absolutely weird. This happens because the file name that you are linking to does not exist no more as the webmaster has changed the name of the file.

The same is the case when a webmaster deletes a file on the original website. This would also create a bad user experience for your website as your website will start showing empty spaces on the areas where the hot linked files are supposed to be displayed. You would not get any instant notification when the files are deleted on the original server.

Another case is when a user changes the image, keeping the image name the same. This would also result in irrelevant images showing up in your web pages without your knowledge. These all things would create a negative impact on your website and may prevent your regular visitors from visiting your website. If such discrepancies happen in your website, new visitors would also not dare to return to your website in the future.

Engaging in such activities may also be a violation of the copyright law and the original webmaster can file a case against you. So if you want your website to get better traffic and improve your user stickiness it is better to avoid such practices for your website. For the webmasters who fear that their SEO activities would be tampered with such activities, hot linking or bandwidth theft can be prevented with the use of a .htaccess file, which I would be blogging about later.

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  1. […] Hot linking is a topic that has been discussed in this blog and this is a situation which no webmaster would like to happen with their website. Hot linking clearly eats up the bandwidth of your website and thereby caused negative impact on the overall search engine performance of the website. Hot linking usually happens when large files are hosted on your website and other small websites want to take advantage of this without using their own bandwidth. Hot linking can be disabled or prevented with the help of a .htacess file. By writing few simple lines of codes on the .htacess files you can prevent the unauthorized linking of the files from your website. You just need to upload the .htacess to the root of your website once your finish writing the code. If you want to prevent the hot linking of JPG, GIF and PNG files from your website, then the htacess syntax can be written as follows. RewriteEngine on # Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?yourwebsite.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .(jpg|gif|png)$ – [F] […]

  2. […] Hot Linking and How it Affects Your Website […]

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