The Value of Hotlinking
Saturday, September 30th, 2006
Images have been a big part of my SEO research. I have even made several blogs for the purpose of experimentation in image SEO. Voodoo Blog was the first such blog. The Definarium came later. I used these blogs (and others) to test the effects of anchor text, ALT tags and other contextual variables on the treatment of images by the Search Engine.
I recently received a comment on the Definarium from a person who wanted to help me understand why hotlinking is bad, because it steals bandwidth. I am aware of this problem and did not wish to advocate bandwidth theft. Here is the email I sent the person who left a comment: