Prevent Hotlinking from Specific Sites Only

You want to prevent hot-linking.

But not ALL websites. Sometimes you don’t mind if someone hotlinks from a forum or a review about your product, etc. However there are those that you DO want to block.

You can use the code below and place it into your htaccess file.

I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside my images folder, to just protect that folder, and to keep things straight forward.

If you wish to send a differnt image to the offending website, change the last line to an image that is outside your domain, or in a folder a level above where your .htaccess file is located.

Example: If I placed the code in the .htaccess file inside http://example.com/images, then my “nohotlink.jpg” image should be located http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg (otherwise it will blocked by it’s own rule).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?ebay\.ca/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?abc\.net/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ http://example.com/nohotlink.jpg [L]