Help with unauthorised links to our website

[Ali-G]

Can someone please tell me how to stop people using my website address to advertise their website. We were checking our ranking in search engines, in particular using MSN and Yahoo, and a dodgy/unsavoury website is using our website address as a search keyword. We do not want people searching our website to be directed to these kind of sites.

We appreciate any suggestion on how to eliminate this problem.

Thanks

[bddotnet]

Not sure if this will help, but you can add this to your .htaccess file to prevent leeching:

The first thing to check in your .htaccess file is that RewriteEngine is on. Then, add the rules to prevent the leeching. Here is an example of the code:


RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://themebot.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://themebot.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(.*)$ http://themebot.com/ [R,NC]


Obviously you would change the references of themebot.com to whatever your domain is. Also you want to take into account whether your site is using www or not for the URLs.

So now that you have added the code to your .htaccess file, it will prevent other sites from stealing your files and bandwidth. The images will simply be broken, not appear or can be replaced. Also, the code can redirect people from the leeching site back to your site if they have been using the links for your file downloads.

Also, you can force the www to prevent duplication:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

[entrecon]

I don't think you can do anything at your site.

You can try and contact Google and see if they will do anything, but my guess is your pretty much out of luck.

[Ali-G]

Not sure if this will help, but you can add this to your .htaccess file to prevent leeching:

The first thing to check in your .htaccess file is that RewriteEngine is on. Then, add the rules to prevent the leeching. Here is an example of the code:


RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://themebot.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://themebot.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(.*)$ http://themebot.com/ [R,NC]


Obviously you would change the references of themebot.com to whatever your domain is. Also you want to take into account whether your site is using www or not for the URLs.

So now that you have added the code to your .htaccess file, it will prevent other sites from stealing your files and bandwidth. The images will simply be broken, not appear or can be replaced. Also, the code can redirect people from the leeching site back to your site if they have been using the links for your file downloads.

Also, you can force the www to prevent duplication:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]


Hi bddotnet, thanks for your suggestion. It is worth a go, will try anything to stop this problem. Ali-G

[Ali-G]

By the way I have check the .htaccess and under it there is an option to enable the 'hotlink protection'. Can someone please tell me what does it do if I enable this option.

Thanks

[IanS]

It re-writes your .htaccess file to stop others linking directly to your images. That doesn't sound like the issue here though. You said they're using keywords in some way, not hotlinking.

[snowmaker]

Can someone please tell me what does it do if I enable this option.
See this link, http://www.free-webhosts.com/definition/hotlinking.php, which defines 'hotlinking'. Also note that while this 'option' does what it's supposed to most of the time, it is fairly easy to 'get around it'.