Mod Rewrite Question



You don't want to do it that way, because you'd be telling the server to look for everything in your images folder and reference that external host. If you plan on keeping all your of your site's template images, etc. in a different directory than "images", cool, otherwise you'd want something like this (haven't tested it).

Code: 
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^images/some-special-name-to-denote-image-redirection/(.+)$ http://img4.affnetwork.com/images/125x125/domain.com/images/full/images_misc/$1 [R,NC]
What this does is allow you to have "your" site's domain and the top-level images directory ahead of the image file. The server then will pull using the real file path and should show it instead, without it looking like you're hotlinking in the page source.

Do keep in mind that any web browser can see the real page request by viewing headers, so you won't really be fooling people who are tech savvy, but it does make stuff look cleaner.
 
Rexibit said:
You don't want to do it that way, because you'd be telling the server to look for everything in your images folder and reference that external host. If you plan on keeping all your of your site's template images, etc. in a different directory than "images", cool, otherwise you'd want something like this (haven't tested it).

Code: 
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^images/some-special-name-to-denote-image-redirection/(.+)$ http://img4.affnetwork.com/images/125x125/domain.com/images/full/images_misc/$1 [R,NC]
What this does is allow you to have "your" site's domain and the top-level images directory ahead of the image file. The server then will pull using the real file path and should show it instead, without it looking like you're hotlinking in the page source.

Do keep in mind that any web browser can see the real page request by viewing headers, so you won't really be fooling people who are tech savvy, but it does make stuff look cleaner.
Click to expand...

im trying to do it for seo purposes....do you think its super easy to detect?
 
AdHustler said:
im trying to do it for seo purposes....do you think its super easy to detect?
Click to expand...

It's not "super easy".

I'd look at it this way: it's known that Google's algorithm has weights against any known malware/virus scripts detected or suspected on a domain. Part of that detection comes from checking headers. So, they are very likely to "log" redirected and masked URLs whether or not they are harmful.

I don't know of any case studies or evidence saying it harms or benefits rankings, but I was just tossing that out there. It's one of those items where you have to ask yourself, "Would Google really care to penalize a site for masking a URL to an image?" Common sense says no because an image doesn't really pose a threat to a user and doesn't mess with a their browsing experience, so why make it part of the ranking algorithm?
 
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