“Inline Linking” or “Deep Linking” is the practice of linking to content hosted on a website you don’t own. There are various reasons why you might do this, but the practice is often frowned upon by site owners because it generates traffic that doesn’t come from actual site visitors. Not only does this drive up hosting fees (since it causes more work for the servers), it tends to pollute web server statistics, making it harder to understand what legitimate site users are doing. And, in the worst case scenario, if the content that is doing the linking gets slashdotted, it may bring down any servers it links to.

Thus, when someone named, “k”, started using an image from my site in their signature on VBForums.com, which gets 100x more traffic than little ‘ol broofa.com does, it didn’t go unnoticed.

A common remedy for such problems is to simply change the URL for the image (i.e. break it) and wait for the linker to notice and update their content. In this case, however, that didn’t work – it just resulted in tons of 404 errors showing up in my logs for several months. So, I’m trying something a little more drastic. We’ll see if it has any effect.

[UPDATE, 2008-09-21: I’m happy to report that “iPrank” is no longer linking to broofa.com images in his signature. And, yes, as Tom points out I probably should have used an htaccess rewrite rule to resolve this, however I’m not sure I would have achieved anywhere near the same level of amusement.]