Can Bandwidth Thieves Increase Your PR?

Recently an image used on one of our sites was linked to in a popular forum. When I say linked, I mean the picture was put in someone’s post and it was feeding off our server (ie. hotlinking). Sure, we could put in some hotlink protection, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to perform a little experiment..

Do search engines look at off-site images in the same way they look at links? Will someone hotlinking my images in a forum actually count as a vote toward my site’s Page Rank? Probably not, but it would be nice if it did - as hotlinking generally only happens when the original content is worth ‘taking’ in the first place.

I’ll keep an eye on the stats over the next few months, but chances are the only thing that will increase as a result of this hotlinking is our bandwidth usage and not so much our visitors from search engines.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 11:42 pm and is filed under SEO, Page Rank. 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.