I have a question:

This link is getting hammered in my web stats - over 1800 hits in the last 2 days alone:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...n.co.nz/%3Fcat%


how can I tell where it is being linked from really? it seems like an awful lot of traffic for one old (cute, but not amazing) shot.


Any thoughts interweb gurus? all I can see is the google image link - is there a way to find out what is linking to the google link?

I am no help on this, but I would love to find out the "how to" of this question as well.. I have one photo of a little girl on my blog and that one photo alone keeps getting hit from all over the place/world and in some instances its for quite long periods of time. Its strange...



~~
Angela

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=howworks

here's a free tracker (I just googled "tracking links")

I don't want to sound alarmist, but there are a lot of wackjobs out there. If it were my site and I was getting a lot of hits on a picture of a child, I would take the photo down.

But you may want to do the tracking first - perhaps its another photography forum, who is in awe of your lighting

I agree with this--if they're hitting an image of a kid, I would take it down and put it in a private gallery.

But I also agree with trying to find the source first.

This may seem harsh... but all those photos of children are probably in the hands of creeps now. IMHO, images of children (certainly larger images) should be kept behind password protection and even that is no guarantee that they won't be downloaded by pedophiles.

I see you're using photobucket, at the very least move the images around there and thus the linking will be messed up. Yes, you'll have to relink what you have posted. As it stands, if someone is passing around that link, even if you remove the image from your site, it will still be accessible if remains in the same place in Photobucket.

I'd be inclined to notify the authorities about this... it just doesn't sound right. If it was another "photography" site that was doing the linking, I'd suspect they'd choose a different image. This is WAY too fishy!

Good luck.

yeah, well almost all of the hits (closing in on 7000 now over 3 days) have come from America, so I guess that fits the pedophile profile..... I mean these are literally 1000's of them over there right, all accessing this one photo via a google link...........

honestly, if you think about it for more than say 10 seconds, you'll see how silly/paranoid that sounds.



here is the answer (a friend pointed me in the right direction):

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=389190

not quite as sinister as you would be led to believe eh??

Thanks for the link dragonfly, although it wouldn't have helped, because it was being linked via google, I would have needed to see googles tracking to find it.

I guess I could have just asked them.

The only way you can view it is by going onto your control panel for your host, and viewing the Aw stats, this will show you the last 1000 locations and ip addresses that hit, paged, or uniquely viewed your site. So you can see where they are all linking from and how they get to your site, google, forums, etc.

The only prevention of this is to have a password protected code for clients to view the photos on your blog, or website. However I don't think you can do it on blogger, but possibly on wordpress.

Hope that helps!

thanks Ross,

I have my wordpress blog on my own server and statcounter finding the incoming links, all I could see was the google link coming through, because at the top of that thread was the google link, so it wasn't directly linked to my site, hence I couldn't see where it was really coming from.



haha - I sound like I'm talking in circles.......hahahaha MENTAL!

Nope,

If you use a statcounter it provides the Awstats which include all of the viewers, and maybe it isnt quite as extensive as a control panel on a server or custom blog but it does provide you with links as to who might be viewing your blog and from where.

So really with an opensource blogging program like wordpress or blogger you dont really have an option as to who can and who cannot view your posts.

oh, I think you have me all wrong - nowhere did I say I wanted to restrict viewing of my blog, that's a non-issue - I want it to be publicly viewed ....... I wanted to see if I could find where linked links are coming from....

Yeah the only method is using statcounter, that is the best you will get for a standard blog. I mentioned about restriction to posts from what i read above about children.

When I clicked on your link...I got your blog with lots of photos when I scroll down. The plumber photo of the little girl.....it might be bringing in lots of undesirable attention. I would remove it if it were my child.

Laurie

glad its people lovin' your work.

I'm only a wee bit paranoid because I've known a couple people (on-line) who's children's photos have ended up in weird places.

Well this is definitely good news. Glad your work is getting some attention.

Sorry to have sounded paranoid but I too have had friends find photos of their own kids, which they'd posted on photo sharing sites, turn up in very undesirable places. I'm delighted that is not the case here.