Understanding Hotlinking: What Is It And How To Prevent It

Understanding Hotlinking is critical for any website owner as it can put an unnecessary drain on your resources. It is an act where another website owner utilizes the bandwidth of your website. It is done mostly to display videos, audio, or images on your website on their website. This act as a whole is called Hotlinking and is one of the Blackhat SEO malpractices. When such a thing happens, your website will be covering and paying the server resources whenever that hotlink image, video, or audio is displayed.

Every website owner must have heard about the hotlink website once as it puts the website at a big disadvantage. This article aims to explain the hotlink meaning, what is Hotlinking, and how to prevent Hotlinking for your website.

What is Hotlinking?

Hotlinking is an act of Blackhat SEO where a website owner links a file from another hosted server without downloading it. By Hotlinking the said file, they host it on their server without providing any citation. Mostly Hotlinking is done for images but other digital assets can also be hotlinked.

This Hotlinking needs Website Hosting for the said file and uses the bandwidth of your website hosting. Not only is Hotlinking a website bad etiquette, some even calling it theft. The reason is simple, a hotlink website doesn’t get any benefit and instead, the site’s own bandwidth is used. So, this is kind of like shared hosting where you are paying the bill for others.

There are multiple steps one can take to prevent Hotlinking of their website.

What is Hotlink protection?

Hotlink protection is the way by which you protect your website’s digital assets – ensuring only people you authorized can access it. This is an important matter because a hotlink website is a detrimental one with problems like:

• Slow page loading
• High hosting costs
• Excessive server resource usage

All of these disadvantages are without a single benefit to the owner.

When you invest in Hotlink prevention, you are saving your bandwidth and increasing the overall performance of your website. Protect your website from less reputable sites by using hotlink protection. It keeps others from using your content without permission.

The benefit of Hotlink prevention is that Search Engines are able to recognize your website as a high-quality one.

What is Image Hotlinking?

Hotlinking images means when some website owners use the images of another website owner via their URL reference. Hotlinking is when you use someone’s image on your website without permission or giving credit, and that’s not okay.

It puts an unnecessary drain on the original website owner’s server resources. It also hurts user experience.

How to stop Image Hotlinking?

To protect your website from Image Hotlinking, there are various hotlink SEO tools like:

• CDNs
• WordPress Plug-ins
• cPanel
• Apache

How to Ensure Hotlink Protection For Your Website?

Hotlink Protection is a very serious practice that every website owner should adhere to. This protection resolves issues like bandwidth and digital assets theft.

If you’re worried about whether hotlink protection will impact your website’s search engine presence, the answer is no. Your SEO efforts will remain unaffected if the image indexing is not blocked by search engines.

There are 4 widely used methods for Hotlink protection.

Access the cPanel Settings

This method is acceptable even if your website has a cPanel hosting server or any other kind. This process is the same for all kinds of control panels. The Steps are:

1. Log In to the Cpanel account
2. Under the Security menu, click Hotlink protection
3. Enable hotlink protection
4. Verify your sites are listed under the URLs to allow access to the section
5. Enter all the file types you want to protect
6. Put URL you want to redirect to, for anyone who tries to hotlink to your files or images. If the configuration is correct, click Submit
7. Hotlink protection will be enabled, to verify please navigate back to the hotlink protection page.

Accessing the FTP Client

The second method is to edit the .htaccess file of your website and access it via the FTP client or the ‘’File Manager’’ of your virtual machine server.

Remember: this method requires editing the website’s original code. So, even a minor error can render the website unusable.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|png|css|pdf)$ - [F]

• Change the example.com to the domain name of your website.
• Save this edited .htaccess file and upload it back in the folder ‘’public_html’’.

Disabling the Right-Click Function

To hotlink images, users mostly use the Right-Click functionality. Users right-click on the image, copy its address and embed the copied URL on their website. To prevent image Hotlinking, you need to simply disable this Right-Click functionality.

This is a controversial solution as it won’t prevent every type of user from Hotlinking. Some can find a way to work around it if they really want to hotlink website images.

• Still, in case, this is a pure JavaScript you need to prevent the total number of image Hotlinking.

<script type="text/javascript">

var message="Function Disabled!";

function clickIE4(){

if (event.button==2){

alert(message);

return false;

}

}

function clickNS4(e){

if (document.layers||document.getElementById&&!document.all){

if (e.which==2||e.which==3){

alert(message);

return false; }

}

}

if (document.layers){

document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN);

document.onmousedown=clickNS4;

}

else if (document.all&&!document.getElementById){

document.onmousedown=clickIE4;

}

document.oncontextmenu=new Function("alert(message);return false")

</script>

Using A CDN with Built-in Hotlink Protection

The safest and the easiest way to prevent Hotlinking is to use a CDN with built-in hotlink protection.

A common CDN like this is Cloudflare which prevents others from hotlink websites. Once you enable it, the website will block any hotlink attempt of your digital assets. They can still view and download images on your website.

This method has one drawback; it interferes with crawling bots like Googlebot. This results in preventing access to your website and in turn lowers your website’s indexing.

Conclusion

Hotlinking is a serious threat to any website’s resources with increased hosting costs and slower loading times. To prevent Hotlinking, there are various viable methods like .htaccess configurations, an efficient CDN for website hosting, or manual settings from hPanel. Image Hotlinking is amongst the most common Hotlinking attempts. It can be prevented with tools like WordPress Plug-ins, Apache and cPanel configurations. Every website owner should ensure putting in measures to prevent Hotlinking. This not only keeps the website in optimal performance but increases its credibility on Search engine rankings.

FAQ