Webmasters Blog – Salem-News.com

Archive for January, 2009

Hot linked images has never been much of an issue for this site (salem-news). Having news summarized along with a pictures on a wide variety of sites make blocking of all hot linked images not a possibility.

But a growing number of spam blogs (blogs that do nothing but post pictures, text and links from other sites for the purpose of gaining search ranking) using images from the site required some sort of response.

Using the method from Blocking certain sites from hotlinking images via mod_rewrite

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?badsite1\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?badsite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ images/no_hotlink.jpg [L]

Is close to what I wanted but preferred to just 403 all referrals from domains by keyword where keyword is the domain name or enough of the domain name to be unique and only block that domain or similar sub domains. I’m not worried about sending a no hot linking allowed image as most likely the sites do not care they are just up to mislead search bots.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword1) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword2) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (keyword3) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

In a possible sign of the poor economy beginning to hit the Internet Netcraft`s web server survey showed a loss of 1.23 million sites.

In the January 2009 survey we received responses from 185,497,213 sites, reflecting an uncharacteristic monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.

Apache’s market share grew by more than 1 percentage point this month, extending its lead over Microsoft IIS, which has fallen to less than a third of the market. In total, Apache gained 1.27 million sites this month.

Microsoft showed the largest loss this month, after more than 2 million blogging sites running on Microsoft-IIS websites expired from the survey.

January 2009 Web Server Survey