I run a few websites, and I get the error logs emailed to me every day. A few days ago I noticed someone was having trouble attempting to link to an image on one of my sites. It was the following image:



I had been using the image on a page of a defunct product of mine for a while, and it must have been ranking fairly high for searches for "tombstone" images. Now, I don't care that people were using the image. Hell, I got it from some clip art site, so I have no rights to the image. But if you're going to use it, at least copy it to your server first. Most people were just linking directly to the file on my server.

My first reaction was one of minor, half-hearted indignation, so I just renamed the file on my end. The dozens of sites that were using the image now had broken images on their sites. Ha! Justice was served. For the next few days my error log was filled with a bunch of sites that were attempting to still link to the old file name.

But then I got to thinking. Are these sites actually helping my Google ranking? And then the big idea hit me: I have control over the content of the image. So I not only renamed the file back to its original name, but I did a little modification to the image itself:



Take that, bandwidth stealers! Now I had a Babble banner on a couple dozen sites - for free. The only downside is that it's only an image, so people can't click on it to go to Babble. But maybe a few people will take the time to type in the address and check it out.

So next time you discover someone linking to one of your images and stealing your bandwidth, go guerrilla on them.