Toxic foreign backlinks to my images

[Peacefieldti]

I have been getting alot of toxic backlinks to my images, can shopify or an app create hotlinks to my images, making it a benefit to my shop instead of a negative SEO .

Thanks

[Erin]

Hi, @Peacefieldti. We understand discovering this can be alarming, and having these types of backlinks referencing your storefront is not ideal. Since backlinks are not hosted on your website or in your Shopify account, our support can be somewhat restricted due to these third party hosting platforms. That being said, we can still share some information to help.

To start, it's good to know that your site and account are not necessarily at risk or being harmed. Backlinks in general are valuable because to Google and other search engines, multiple 'backlinks' pointing to a single website boosts its Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and actually helps drive traffic to the backlinker’s own site. While it is possible that multiple 'low value' backlinks may have an adverse affect on SEO, one or two backlinks will have no effect on your business at all. It's also useful to note that backlinks do not use injected code, do not reference an actual 'object', and do not save any kind of link on your site. Rather, your site is referenced by the backlink, which is hosted on an entirely different domain.

We recognise that allowing this to be left alone is not an approach everyone will be comfortable with, so to help mitigate the effect of backlinks referencing your website we recommend you consider following these steps by Google to disavow links to your site. For context, these steps are not guaranteed to work and it may take time to resolve across the web with the way data propagation works. This is also an advanced feature. If it is used incorrectly it can potentially harm your site's performance in Google's search results more than it would help it, so we recommend that you only disavow backlinks if you believe that there are a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, or if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. Although we know that the presence of third party backlinks does not present a security concern, we also recommend conducting an Account security best practice check in order to provide peace of mind.

[PageFly-Theodor]

Hi @Peacefieldti ,
This is Theodore from PageFly - Shopify Page Builder App.

Shoplifting images (hotlinking) hurts your SEO, not helps. Here's why:

• It's not your image: Search engines favor original content.
• Image owner can take action: They could remove the image, hurting your site.

Do this instead:

• Upload images directly to Shopify.
• Use Shopify CDN for faster loading.
• Allow image sharing if desired (not needed for SEO).

Dealing with toxic backlinks:

• Identify them using Google Search Console.
• Disavow bad links to tell Google to ignore them.

Best regards,
Theodore | PageFly