How to allow Google Images search to by pass hotlink protection?

Posted by Marco Demaio on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Marco Demaio
Published on 2012-12-01T16:49:26Z Indexed on 2012/12/01 17:18 UTC
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I saw Google Images seems to index my images only if hotlink protection is off. *

I use anyway hotlink protection because I don't like the idea of people sucking my bandwidth, i simply this code to protcet my sites from being hotlinked:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?mydomain\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [F,NC,L]

But in order to allow Google Image search to bypass my hotlink protection (I want Google Images search to show my images) would it suffice to add a line like this one:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google\.com$ [NC]

Because I'm wondring:

  • is the crawler crawling just from google.com?
  • and what about google.it / google.co.uk, etc.?

FYI: on Google official guidelines I did not find info about this.


  • I suppose hotlink protection prevents Google Images to show images in its results because I did some tests and it seems hotlink protection does prevent my images to be shown in Google Images search.

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