Patrick O’Keefe

I’m noticing more and more people participating in an unfortunate trend. It’s always been around, but for whatever reason, I’m seeing it more and more. This is where people link directly to images on servers that they most likely don’t have permission to link to. I’m not talking about embedding images so that they display on the page (what would traditionally be known as bandwidth theft or hotlinking), I’m talking of a hyperlink to the image, like this.

Why is this bad? Because people place images on their website to bring people to said website or to enhance the website in some way, generally speaking (or, at least, that should be the presumption unless otherwise stated or indicated). When you link directly to the image, they don’t get a visitor, but they do have their bandwidth used, which costs money and/or resources.

What should you do instead? Link to the page with the image on it, not the image itself. If the image isn’t readily visible on said page, just tell people where to look. But, using people’s bandwidth by direct linking isn’t a cool thing to do.

(As I mentioned, this is with the exception of sites that specifically allow this - like many free file hosting services, for example).

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.