I’ve noticed something unusual in my blog traffic the last month or so: I’ve been getting a lot of http://images.google.com referrals. Unlike the Google-search links I used to get where certain word-searches brought readers, these are driven by photos.
Ok, I’ve posted quite a few photos here in the last 2+ years, so that image searches shouldn’t be too unusual — except there appears to be a certain pattern to the images being viewed: they’re either people who want to view the “Loch Ness Monster Truck” evidence photo from last May…or people who want to see a picture of the Mall Diva in a prom dress.
It’s hard to keep a thorough list since my Sitemeter account only registers the last 100 visits, but as of 15 minutes ago 77 of the last 100 visitors to this blog had come from image searches; 18 of these were Loch Ness Monster Truck driven and 16 were led to see a photo of the Diva and her cousin in their formal gowns. Another half-dozen or so wanted to see the photo of the bruise on MD’s knee from last fall’s Paintball outing. That’s actually a significant decrease for that particular photo; one month recently my Powerblogs tracking tool showed more than 800 referrals to that image from a website in Taiwan!
Are there not enough lovely things to look at on the internet that people have to come looking for an oversized tire in a loch, a couple of well-dressed girls or a close-up of a naked, discolored knee? Are there that many fetishists out there living in their mom’s garage, surfing the internet so they can ogle and drool over a photo: “Ooooh, it’s a B.F. Goodrich!”
I know I should be glad for the traffic, but frankly it’s beginning to creep me out.
Sorry, that was me…..all 77 times.
I was trying to photoshop Diva driving a monster truck while covered with paintball hits. I was in Taiwan on business at the time. It didn’t work out. But as you can see I was very persistant.
Basically, what is happening is called “hotlinking”, and it pisses most web-type people off. Unfortunately there are alot of people that don’t have very good netiquette.
I would also like to point out that if you have full access to your server, you can block your images folder from being linked externally.
For example, most people just block the image from being displayed on any site but your own. Yet other even more devious people, set up their server so that any outside requests for an image is automatically given a pre-defined image, which may or may not be incredibly disgusting and horribly damaging to the eyes.
Ooh, I like that last part. They come for an image of Mall Diva and you give them Janet Reno. Cool.
Uh, sure….although I’ve seen people use pics that would have made pics of Janet Reno seem like heaven. It depends on how mean you want to be.