Sorry I haven’t been posting lately guys. I got lots of pretty damn good excuses for it but I’ll spare you of having to hear them. This week I’m back on the ball and I’m going to attempt to up my post volume to make up for the slack the last week and a half.
Today’s post is a detailed way to deal with pesky hotlinkers. Hotlinkers are people who use your binary content and instead of hosting it themselves they just link directly to it on their site. I saw a funny article awhile back about a guy who threatened to sue another webmaster for removing the images he was hotlinking to on his server. That’s pretty funny stuff for anyone with half a brain, but there must of been a better way for the victim to get his rewards from the hotlinker instead of having to rename or remove the images. So true to tradition here at Blue Hat we’re going to look at some simple ways to not only stop them from hotlinking to your material but to try to get some of their visitors out of it as well. Personally I see hotlinking as a compliment. It means you have quality content. However there in lies the opportunity. If they are hotlinking to your content then their visitors must be of the similiar niche as yours. So I see no moral dilemma in trying to grab some of their visitors while politely letting them know that you don’t appreciate them sucking up your bandwidth. Let’s look at a few media formats and determine some ways to draw their visitors to your site using your .htaccess file. If you don’t know what a .htaccess file is please go here and do some reading.