You want to prvent hotlinking.

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]

Seobook has released a very nice firefox extension call Rank Checker. This is a free open-source tool that will show your rank for specific keywords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Using a rank checking tool is a real time saver. Rather than try to dig through results to find your site, this will give you the data in just a few seconds. The best way would be to export the data each time and name each file with the date it was run. This way you can track your ranking changes over time.

Google BIG webmaster tools.

Google did a nice thing for webmasters by creating a handy tool to help track sites and also to upload your newly created sitemaps.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and sign up account, or use an existing Google account if you have one.

XML Sitemap? What in the world is that you might ask. Well not so long ago Google came out with a way for webmasters to tell Google about their pages. The most common way is to use an XML sitemap. How does it work? You create a sitemap, then tell Google where that sitemap is, then they will download it and then maybe crawl some of your sites, and just maybe add them to their index of websites.

Since then a few of the other major search engines jumped on board the wagon, and now it is supported by Yahoo and Microsoft too.