Previously, I wrote a post pointing out several suspicious sites that were offering natural cures for shingles, GERD, ulcers and genital warts, all written by the same person. It was ranking pretty well on Google for about a week or so, and then suddenly my rankings vanished. I couldn’t find it anywhere on Google, no matter how many different combinations of relevant keywords I used. Meanwhile this motherf-, excuse me, this dude continues to litter the first page search results for the same keywords.

Ahhh, Google, that ever eternal gatekeeper for quality content on the Internet.

I’m just trying to do a good thing here, trying to help people avoid getting ripped off, and then these anal Googlie Wooglie fartbags had to go breaking my blogging balls.

Ironically enough I stumbled across yet another version of those “natural cure for shingles” sites, this one on the same simpleshinglescure domain, but with the page title saying “Natural Cure for Acid Reflux,” and the author here is an Aaron D. Smith, rather than the Aaron E. Smith shown on the other sites. Different picture too. So there are two Aaron Smiths now? Both hawking cures for shingles?

I have a headache.

Looks like Google’s PageRank is being replaced.

I’ve been checking my blog rankings here and there on the web, when I noticed this at Truth Laid Bear’s Ecosystem:

I think they need to fix that.

Look people, how much effort does it take to download an image from my blog, upload it to a Photobucket or ImageShack account, and then hotlink it from there? 30 seconds worth? If you’re going to hog my bandwidth and directly link my images (without credit mind you), could I not at least have the flipping courtesy of a backlink, you bunch of lazy leeching butt balls? Sheesh.

This has been an ongoing issue for me for some time now, and initially I had been using .htaccess to block visitors from hotlinking my files. The only problem with this approach is that my images don’t show up in online feedreaders, and despite the hotlinking abuse, I still wanted Google and other search engines to index my images. Image based search engines are often an overlooked source for SEO purposes and bringing in more traffic to your site, so I wasn’t quite ready to toss in the towel just yet.

Interestingly, Blogstorm came up with a novel way to offset the damages of hotlinking, by designing a plugin that stops hotlinkers from right-clicking and grabbing the image’s url. Instead, when they right click an image, a window will pop up with a snippet of alternative code that they can use to link the image. The code actually wraps the image in a link, providing a legitimate backlink that hotlinkers can use for… whatever. The more savvy Internet user can find ways around this of course, but it seemed to be an excellent way to encourage backlinking and thus boost your site’s search engine rankings.

Unfortunately the plugin only worked sporadically on my site. It didn’t work at all in IE7, and in Firefox the window containing the alternative code would always pop up at the top of the screen, so if the image in question was located at the bottom, visitors would have to scroll up again to see the window. There were also some unexpected issues when an image was lightboxed, and it also caused some weird things to happen with my AdSense ads. Alas, I had no choice but to uninstall the plugin.

This project is still in its infancy though, so I’m hoping the developers will be able to build on this idea and work out whatever kinks there might be to create what would be surely be an extremely popular plugin. After all, if people are going to hotlink images, we might as well derive some benefit from it. Savvy?

Update: In the meantime, it looks like Thiefinder has a cool little PHP script that can save considerable time in checking your logs for hotlinking. If it works it would be a godsend for me.