How to allow Google Images search to by pass hotlink protection?
- by Marco Demaio
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.
