Never published this before, so this is a DaniWeb.com Exclusive :)
If your WP-Site has a lot of K-Links, you should consider using this script.
It definetly works. For now...
Negative SEO through spamming Backlinks can be a huge problem for the visibility of a webpage.
You can not defend your site against all kinds of attacks, but on one of the most common, you can significantly decrease the negative effects:
"K-Links" (new version: C-Links), where Image Hotlinking is used to generate Links, targeting mainly Wordpress Instances.
Examples:
k-links.png
this is why they're called "K-Links/C-Links". They always end with "-k.html" oder "-c.html"
The basic Anti-Hotlinking-Script can help in reducing the amount of traffic, when hotlinking is abused to burn your bandwith.
But i have never seen it recover any visibility losses in the SERPs.
This is the basic "Anti-Hotlinking-Script":
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\\.)?daniweb.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\\.)?bing.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\\.)?yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\\.)?duckduckgo.com [NC]
RewriteRule \\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|avif|webp|svg)$ /nohotlink.html [L]
</IfModule>
---
content nohotlink.html:
<body>
<h1>Hotlinking not allowed</h1>
<p>Too view our images, please visit our <a href="<https://daniweb.com/>">Website</a>.</p>
</body>It integrates the "Whitelist" directly into .htaccess, which is not optimal.
I had a case, where this caused problems, because the Whitelist was huge (1000+ Domains).
So i found this solution with "RewriteMap", which i integradted into this Script to put the whitelist inside a .txt file.
This also was easier for the client, as he might needs to add entries to the whitelist and like this does not have to edit the htaccess everytime.
I have also set the link inside the HTML to rel="nofollow".
I did get some nice results with this!
Even if there are still other DoFollow-Links on the Hotlinking Site, the presence of this one nofollow-link seems to reduce the toxicity of each one.
Important: Dont link the actual Canonical URl from your Main Page from nohotlink.html!
If your Domain is https://daniweb.com for example, you link to http://www.daniweb.com (with "www" and "http").
I experimented a lot with this and set the Canonical of the nohotlink.html to the Main Page, tested with noindex, nofollow robots tag, but it was all a mess.
If anybody is as deep into this stuff as i am, i will be happy to discuss.
Feel free to share your thoughts!
Disclaimer: Please use at your own risk, only if you know, what you are doing. Don't make me responsible, if you make mistakes. They are yours, not mine.
