Negative SEO - image links from hacked websites

Hi everyone

I have been reading this forum for a while, soaking up a lot of wisdom.
Now I have a question reagarding weird backlinks I keep getting on my sites, they seem to come from hacked websites almost on a daily basis.
Funny thing is thay they seem to work by copying an image from my websites, posting it to hacked website and linking back to mine.

It is really annoying to disavow 5 websites I am tracking, I dont want to even think what is happening with other 30 websites I am responsible with but did not yet get to checking.

How dangerous is this and is there a way to stop it?
Thanks!

i see weirdest ass links ever in GWT but i doubt anyone in the world would NSEO me. thats weird and i saw it on other websites i own as well. possibly someone's bot? but these links do not have any influence, at least in my case

dude
beware
there s thing called mywot reputation and those people not very bright

How come you instantly jumped to the conclusion that it gotta be negative SEO?
There's a lot of shitty sites out there; just because a couple of them links to you doesn't mean there's a negative SEO campaign going on...

This happens to my sites all the time and has never been an issue before. I've been hit with NSEO in more competitive niches and this type of image linking is nothing like that.

If you want stop them from actually serving your images, you can use CloudFlare's image hotlinking feature or a similar solution. There isn't much you are going to be able to do to stop them from grabbing the links other than blocking out IPs accessing your website though. I find rate limiting crawls on your site is generally a good idea, if you are running something large and this type of thing happens a lot.

Brian Alexander said:

How come you instantly jumped to the conclusion that it gotta be negative SEO?
There's a lot of shitty sites out there; just because a couple of them links to you doesn't mean there's a negative SEO campaign going on...

Click to expand...

Maybe I did jump to conclusion. But its not just "couple of them" Its really a lot.
They probably do not have much effect, but Im afraid that that one update will come when they will start having effect.

@Zelgar thanks for the input, will definitely take a look at that, we actually do use CF.

People do negative SEO for sure, or haphazardly do something that's effectively negative SEO for you. How big of a deal is it? So long as you're disavowing the really bad links somewhat regularly 3-4 times a year you should be okay. If you notice a ranking drop or haven't been ranking well then try disavowing some links

You can try this method to prevent hotlinking by editing your .htaccess file - http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html or you can enable hotlink protection in your cpanel.