Deep Linkers -- Not Thinkers
I posted a blog entry a while back about my observation that the Aeronca C3 airplane looked a lot like Droopy Dog. Of course the search engines crawled the page, and pretty soon the Droopy image was in their image search results. Apparently a lot of people found this image, and "deep linked" to it from various sites.
By "deep linking" in this context I mean this: someone built a web page (or more commonly posted a comment on a blog or other forum) that included the image served from my poor little server. Every time the page on that website is served, the image gets pulled from my machine. In effect, I'm providing free image hosting of a sort. Now actually, I don't mind this too much, but recently the deep links have come from some very high traffic web sites.
Instead of just removing the image I configured my web server to look at the referrer header when receiving a request for the Droopy image. If the request came from this website, Yahoo, or Google, or if it has no referrer, then the Droopy image is served. If the request comes from anywhere else, then a different image is served. This has the nice effect of continuing to show Droopy on my website as it always has, and letting that same Droopy image show up in Yahoo and Google search results. But if used directly by another site -- then no Droopy.
I'm writing about this for two reasons: my amusement, and to let the deep linkers know (should they care to investigate), why the image they linked to of Droopy Dog:
now looks like this:
Categories: humor technology
