Inline linking, also known as hotlinking or leeching, is something all webmasters don’t like. Usually it happens with images. For those who don’t know what is hotlinking: If your image is referred, usually inside IMG tags, on someone else’s website then each time the visitor comes to this site, this image is downloaded from your site, thus stealing your bandwidth (traffic). The fact of using your images without your permission you will not like as well.
You can fix this through .htaccess by disallowing images to load if referrer is not your host and display a “humiliating” image of your choice on the leecher’s site. This technique is well explained here.
But there are more tricky approaches to this problem. (more…)