Hotlinking is where people link your image to their website. This could means they (the people who link your image to their website) are using your bandwidth.
How to check who hotlink your image, Image Hotlink Checker
Do a check in google search images to check other website who hotlink your image from your site. Remember to change yourdomain.com to your own domain.
inurl:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com
Here’s an example, you can see so many website hotlinking to my blog site.
What you can do is to insert this code into your htaccess code into your website.
Don’t know where is your htaccess file located? Look at below photo
If you prevent others from linking to your website’s image, then what about google cache? Will this affect google cache image?
Well here’s the solution for you to prevent hot link images from your site. Paste these code into your htaccess and also upload any hotlink images or you could create one of your own. Remember to replace yourdomain with your own domain name.
[code]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf)$ hotlinking.jpg [NC,L]
[/code]
And for subdomain hotlink here’s the htaccess code, replace yoursubdomain and also yourdomain
[code]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://yoursubdomain.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf)$ hotlinking.jpg [NC,L]
[/code]