Hotlinking of images

#1

Hi, I am trying to prevent hotlinking of images from my websites, by making a Firewall Rules, but it needs to allow Search engines like google and yahoo to index my photos! By searching the web I haven’t found a Firewall Rules that are confirmed to work

I have come to this solution below. ( I am not a programmer; I can manage copy and paste)

(http.request.method eq “GET” and http.referer ne “.example.com” and not http.user_agent contains “(googlebot| cf.client.bot | yahoobot )” and http.request.uri.path eq “/ content / jpg /”)

Any help appreciated.

Cloudflare hotlink protection
#2

There is a dedicate hotlink switch, which will do exactly that.

https://dash.cloudflare.com/redirect?zone=content-protection

#4

Thanks for your prompt reply,

What do you mean by that ?

#5

Did you click the link and check out what it shows?

#6

Yes, “Hotlink Protection-Protect your images from off-site linking”
But then my photos will not be indexed by Search engines like google and yahoo. if I have
got it right

#7

I believe that wont apply to search engines, but you might want to double check this with support.

#8

If you click on help that says: Hotlink protection has no impact on crawling, but it will prevent the images from being displayed on sites such as Google images, Pinterest, etc.

#9

Of course it will, because you would be disabling hotlinking and that will naturally disable that too, because you disabled hotlinking.

#10

I don’t have that hotlink switch on!!

I’m looking for a way so you can’t do hotlinking to my photos,
But still allow Search engines like google and yahoo to index my photos!

#11

In that case you actually want hotlinking and hence cant disable it.

Your best bet would be a firewall rule of this type

image

1 Like
#12

Thank you very much, I want to try it out and see what happens