Tons of Links from Low-Quality Image Directories?

[SylviaH]

Hi Mozzers, I've been receiving a ton of links from low-quality websites that look like image directories or search engines?  They are displaying the images that are hosted on our own website.  They all seem very similar.

Has anyone experienced this and are these harmful?  Should they be left alone or disavowed or..?

Here are a few examples:

http://myimagecollection.net

http://pix-collection.com

http://theimagess.org/

http://123coolpictures.com

etc.

Thanks in advance!

[MoosaHemani]

Nailed it!

[Malika1]

Hi SylviaH,

I have never had any such issues before. However, I do have experience with bad links neighborhood and know how painful it can get when low quality sites start to link.

Don't ignore these links as they will cause harm to the website later on.

I would recommend that you get rid of these links, either these webmasters remove the links or your disavow them.

[EGOL]

I have lots of images on my websites that are popular in Google image search.  These images are often grabbed by "image directory" sites.  The goal of many of these image directory sites is to display your image, or simply link to it, and hope that it gets picked up by image search, which will then result in their site getting attribution for the image and traffic referrals from image search.

We don't allow other sites to use our images, have them marked clearly with copyright, and have cautions about unauthorized use on our own website.  So, if our image on their website appears in Google image search, we submit a DMCA complaint to google and a copyright violation complaint to adsense.  This usually gets the image kicked out of image search and the adsense ads turned off on the offending page.

We submit DMCAs weekly or even daily if there are a lot of active infringers.  Caution.... don't submit DMCAs or complain to adsense unless you are certain that they are not making a fair use of your image.

[Mobilio]

Hotlinking can't be stopped with .htaccess. Because users will see "hotling warning" but bots will still see link.

Since i have exactly same issue with mine images - i disavow them w/o any doubt. This is low quality directory with all images based on some keywords like "aztec". They scrape SERP for images, get top 100 and make "website". No, no please, no.

That's why disavow them ASAP.

[SylviaH]

Thanks for your response, Malika.

After some more research, it turns out that all these image websites are hotlinking our images.  I'm not entirely sure what the point of them doing that is.  It looks like most of these sites don't have a contact form even.  I'm curious if you have any of these image websites hotlinking to your website?

I found a few threads in the google forums with other people experiencing these issues.  Although no one has really talked much about disavowing other than trying to stop them from hotlinking from htaccess.

Not entirely sure if that is the route to go, just disavow, or ignore.

[Malika1]

I don't think there is any value in these websites so it would be a good idea to get rid of them to keep your backlink profile clean.

If the images on your website were not intended to be shared then you can get in touch with these websites and request them to remove the link. I usually take these steps in the whole of getting rid of links from bad neighborhood -

• Request the webmaster to remove the links
• Follow up with them. Usually, the webmasters are busy and dont respond to your first email or forget about taking the links off etc.
• From my experience (only directory sites), these webmasters sometimes come back saying that they can do it but will charge some money - 5,10, 20 bucks. You dont have to pay at all. Simply send them an email that it's fine, you will go ahead and disavow their website if they dont remove it themselves. Some webmasters will remove the link and send you an email confirming that.
• For the webmasters that never got back to you, simply disavow their website.

What I would suggest you to do is that if there are a lot of such websites linking to your site then you should try to understand as to why they are linking to you. This could save you a lot of time in future. It could be just one website triggering the whole issue.

While trying to figure out the root cause, you can start with the process of contacting these webmasters.

If the contact details are not obvious on the website then you can check their whois information.