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
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.