How Google Could be Stealing Your Images … WITHOUT Your Knowledge.

As you may know, Google has a subset of its main search engine that deals only with images . Many times, Web browsers search through this engine and use the images in the results list without regard to copyright or ownership. And I found out yesterday that Google kept trying to index the images in my WEB DESIGN PORTFOLIO and spit them out in the results!

Not good.

How Will I Know If Images Are Being Indexed!?

If I didn’t have my trusty dusty 404 error alerter installed on my server, I would’ve been none the wiser. (You can get this little lightweight script here. We also pre-install it with no additional charge as a bonus, on any website ordered from Chump Change Web Design, along with a few other must-have website savers).

You see, you can set the 404 Alerter by PerlScriptsJavaScripts.com to send you an e-mail whenever a user encounters a missing file on your website. Not just a page, but any file (image, HTML page … or script?? The Alerter just notified me that ‘+$.facebox.settings.loading_image+’ was the missing file. Eh?)

Anyway, you can pack your e-mailed error notice with all of the following variables, or just two — the missing file, and the page it came from.

• Date (obvious)
• Time (clear)
• Missing Page (file the user tried to access)
• Referred From? (page where that file was located)
• Request method (GET or POST)
• User’s Browser (i.e., Mozilla Firefox 5.1, blah-blah)
• IP Address [of the user (or bot!) that just requested the file]

Of course when I checked my stats, I would’ve eventually found this out. But by that time, who knows how many Web users would’ve downloaded my images and had their naughty way with them.

…And How Do I Stop the Madness!?

So anyway, you can prevent Google from grabbing your images for its search results by putting one or more of the following options in your robots.txt file, and uploading it to the root directory of your server:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

* Stops Google from indexing any images on your site, regardless of the image location.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /*.jpeg$
Disallow: /*.png$

* Stops any bot from indexing any image file, regardless of its location.

See here for more information on setting up a robots.txt file.

What if My Images Are Already Being Indexed on Google Images .. or Anywhere Else!?

You can go a step further and prevent ANY website, person, reptile, mammal, etc., from linking to ANY images on your site, and only allow domains you explicitly authorize to use your images. This is called "hotlink protection".

If you have a Web host that uses cPanel, you can enable this feature from there. As of the time of this writing, you’d click the "Hotlink Protection" option under the "Site Management" header. (I’m using cPanel 2.6.x). BUT, then go to htaccesstools to "test hotlink protection ". (Why, because when I tried to do it automatically through cPanel … it didn’t work!)

:-/

If you find that you can’t automatically get cPanel to enable hotlink protection on your domain, you can set it up yourself using your .htaccess file. Just go here , enter your domain, click the button at the bottom, and copy and paste the output that the tool gives you into your .htaccess file … then upload it to your root directory.

Finito! No more image theft. ;)

- H.T.

 Respected Business & Marketing author H.T. Major has nearly a decade of collective experience fine-tuning the art of creating effective, efficient business websites that SELL, and boosting the conversion of existing sites. Now she offers supremely affordable website, photo, & business design services that are not only about creating "pretty pictures", but about creating RESULTS: visit ChumpChangeWebDesign.com.