Hotlinking increases traffic/pageviews?

Question

Several websites are hotlinking my images, I'm going to block them but if hotlinking helps traffic/page-views in any way at the cost of bandwidth, I won't.

Are there any advantages to hotlinking, if any?

Thanks

Answer 1

Well, consider the following:

• Is your server fast? - if it is, then just ignore. if it is NOT, you should block because the bandwidth you're sending over, your server has to process them - thus making it slow for real users of your website.
• Track traffic from hotlinking - install Google Analytics or any other trackers to see if people actually come to your website because of those hotlinking - which i really doubt so.
• Do they link you on those hotlinked images? if not, block.

Overall hotlinking isn't that good. In fact it may cause too much request to your images, not your webpages.

Answer 2

I don't think by solely having links from other sites to images in your site increases your site's page rank in google, so unless you have a site in which images is the primary content of your site, I would try to block those requests.

If it is, I would reconsider implementing hotlink protection or at least the way in which its implemented, as you may in fact start blocking google image search results in the process.

Also,it seems that hotlinking may actually be bad for you if you do not take into consideration other SEO techniques as explained below:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5f222c9485075f8c&hl=en

Answer 3

To include a watermark to an image when is hotlinked is a good option to increase your traffic.