How to Stop a Specific Site from Hotlinking to Your Images
Plagiarism is rampant on the internet. If you’re a blogger-and a good one-chances are someone has stolen your content. There are bad actors who use automatic scrapers that will pull your entire blog posts so they can steal your content and search engine juice! But something you can do is prevent them from showing your images.
If the offending site is hotlinking to your images (linking directly to your site), you can turn off images JUST FOR THAT SITE without jeopardizing your image SEO in search engines or other legit sites that you’ve allowed to respost your articles.
You need access to your file system via FTP or File Manager. Navigate to your /wp-content/uploads folder and edit the .htaccess file. Or create one in that subdirectory.
You want to add these lines:
# NO HOTLINKING FROM BAD SITE
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http(s)?://(www\.)?badsiteurl\.com [NC]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ https://yoursite.com/stolen.jpg [r=307,NC]
- Replace badsiteurl is the base url of the offending site (the one that’s hotlinking to you), making sure you put a slash in front of the tld (.com, .net, etc)
- Upload an image called stolen.jpg to your root (main) directory or to WordPress
- Replace the url in the last line with the url of your image.
Here’s an example image:
That will now show in place of any image on the offending site, but nowhere else. Have questions or need help? Contact me.
