.empresadeserviciosweb.com/what-is-hotlinking-and-how-to-avoid-it/”>What is hotlinking
If you think your server is much faster than what it’s actually delivering to your websites such as WordPress, it may be suffering from the well-known and famous hotlinking.
If you don’t know what it is, I’m going to summarize it for you in this brief post so that you can understand at all times what it’s about, as well as the terrible mishaps that Hotlinking can cause for your <a href="https://www.empresadeserviciosweb.com/como-ganar-reputacion-en-una-nueva-pagina-web/" title="How to gain reputation on a new web page“>reputation on the Internet from an SEO standpoint.
brief explanation of what Hotlinking is about
The famous and much-hated hotlinking is nothing less than someone copying the image from your server via the URL, and whoever copies it pastes your image’s URL on their server to display the image on their website, but it’s actually your own web page that is showing that image on the copier’s website.
Here’s an example in an image so you can get a clearer idea of what hotlinking is, because a picture is worth a thousand words.
consequences of Hotlinking
The consequences that someone doing hotlinking can bring to your server are several.
The first one, which is one of the consequences we always want to avoid, is losing positions in SERP results because your website could become very slow, and the search giant Google doesn’t like indexing websites that are as slow as turtles. Moreover, if your website takes a long time to load, users will leave without reading or seeing what you’re offering them and what they’re looking for.
Another consequence that can give us headaches from the use of hotlinking is when we have contracted a server with bandwidth limited to X, reaching the point of exceeding those limits and the host provider cutting us off.
Likewise, there are host providers that are very cheap and when it comes to providing service they are truly pitiful, even blocking our hosting if there is Hotlinking, this would be due to bandwidth consumption.
If, for example, someone commits an image theft against us, and it turns out that the website where our image is hosted through copying using this type of tactic has thousands of visits, this will be catastrophic; our page will struggle to open, even producing various errors due to request limits from the use of this technique.
How to avoid Hotlinking
Very easy, to prevent anyone from treacherously committing this image theft against us, we will proceed to block this method through rules on our server.
To do so, we will check whether we have in the root directory of our site a file with the name .htaccess; if we don’t have it, we will create it, and to do so we will carry out the following.
We will open the Notepad on our computer and we will save the blank sheet with the name htaccess.
Now we proceed to upload it to our root directory where we have our WordPress installed, as an example.
Once uploaded, we would see it like this: htaccess.txt, so we are going to rename it, and to do so we will delete .txt and add a dot at the beginning of the file name: .htaccess
With this we would now have our .htaccess file created and ready to add the lines of code to prevent Hotlinking on our server.
Now I’m going to show the lines of code that you will need to copy into this file we have created, then save, and the anti-Hotlinking would be ready.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(wp-login.php|wp-admin/|wp-content/plugins/|wp-includes/).* [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://www.XXXXXXX.com.*$ [NC] RewriteRule .(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|mp3|mpg|mp4|mov|wav|wmv|png|gif|swf|css|js)$ – [F,NS,L]
Be careful and modify this URL to your own https://www.XXXXXXX.com; once modified you will need to close the .htaccess file and save changes, from there everything will be ready to prevent anyone from doing hotlinking on your website.
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