Google's John Mueller said that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine.
He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010's or so but not now. Truth is, it is a topic we covered pretty much once and that was back in 2006. Hotlink Protection prevents your images from being used by other sites, which can reduce the bandwidth consumed by your origin server.
The question asked was:
I'd like to ask you a question regarding "hotlink protection" and whether it can/will affect my SEO/visibility.One of our clients' (e.g. site-a.com) files served from their CDN (e.g. site-a.cdnx.com). We have also realized that another website is also using the same media from the exact CDN in their webpages, affecting the bandwidth, accessibility, possibly even user experience on our end.
We consider performing hotlink protection on the CDN and allow only our client's website.
Are there any other websites/domains we should allow/consider when we perform this kind of action? What's the ideal approach here?
John Mueller from Google responded on LinkedIn:
This was more of a topic in the 2010's - I suspect for most sites, static image hosting isn't that much of a load on infrastructure anymore. At the time, people set up hotlink protection with carve-outs for search engines, social image sites, and other sites that they're happy with. That's all fine.
Truth is, this is a service still offered by Cloudflare, so it is something some may be using.
The concern might be around cloaking - showing one thing to search engines and another thing to users. But in this case, what users are seeing is what search engines see. So yes, it is all good if you do this - but make sure not to block everyone by default.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
