Thanks A lot Google!

Clearly, the Google Image changes overall is such an improvement… 50% reduction in visits with more bandwidth consumption…

I suppose analytics are now a horrible metric for performance because of this change… Time to go back to the good old subscriber numbers and number of comments, I guess.

Update: I enabled anti-hotlink protection to redirect to the homepage and guess what, the traffic came back… I wonder why. Still, it’s not a permanent solution as I’m trying to find one that will redirect to the source page, but this will keep visitors from stealing my bandwidth.


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://chikorita157.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://chikorita157.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Image [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners-Google [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Mobile [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Video [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-News [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !msnbot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !slurp [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Bingbot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://chikorita157.com/ [R,NC,L]

Replace chikorita157.com with your own domain name. Also, code updated so it won’t cause problems to people who are trying to view images after redirected.

Update 2: This is a better solution, which I just implemented today. I whitelisted all the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Google Plus) and wordpress.com. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/imaguard/

You may need to do manual edits, but to enable social network hotlinking and prevent  search bots from being blocked, add this before the redirect above (RewriteRule ^(.*)\.(jpg|png|jpeg|gif)$ /show-image/?img=/$1.$2 [R=,NC,L]) in the htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([^.]+\.)?wordpress\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://([^.]+\.)?plus.google\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://([^.]+\.)?mail.google\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://([^.]+\.)?facebook\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([^.]+\.)?facebook\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://([^.]+\.)?twitter\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([^.]+\.)?tumblr\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([^.]+\.)?t\.co [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-image [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners-Google [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Mediapartners [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Mobile [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-Video [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot-News [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !msnbot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !slurp [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Bingbot [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Yandex [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Wordpress [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !BaiDuSpider [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Reeder [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !NetNewsWire [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !RSSOwl [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Thunderbird [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Outlook [NC]