I can assure everybody that I am spending hours daily trying to come up with something that will allow both watermarking and redirecting to post at the same time.
As explained elsewhere on this forum is basically this:
When Google hotlinks an image this is the data sent to the server:
Referrer: Google.*
User-agent: Users Browser
When a user then clicks on the link in google to the image this is sent:
Referrer: Google.*
User-agent: Users Browser
So basically you have two completely identical data sets. I am doing my very best to come up with some way around this through lateral thinking.
As for Fansshare, we have had a few emails referring to their system so I have had time to study what they do already. I'm not convinced it's a good idea. This is my understanding of the Fansshare situation:
1. They dynamically add a tag on their site to all images (img.jpg?rnd=8). This rnd tag presumably is a timestamp. It will work for a given period, then it will stop working.
2. If the timestamp is out of date, the system returns a watermark
3. If the timestamp is missing completely, the system redirects to the blog page.
4. (And this is me guessing) they have an exception from the timestamp requirement for local referrers.
Now, think about this. Either googlebot is going to crawl with the timestamp or without it. If you check the results in google images for fansshare, you find no images linked with a timestamp in the URL. I am presuming these are older crawled images. To me this indicate that there is a problem with the way they have set up their system - that there is something that google really doesn't like here. Possibly it is as simple as googlebot not including a timestamp, not setting a local referrer and then simply not seeing images at.
The Fansshare system isn't overly complicated. But I am not prepared to offer a plugin that may cause googlebot not to see any images to hundreds of people. We still don't know the full effect of all this playing around with redirects in the first place, but at least we know that google can see and crawl the images.
If it turns out Fansshare gets their rankings back, then I will do my very best to come up with a system similar or better. But I think it is wise to hold back a little at this stage. Half the bloggers in the world are currently playing with watermarks and redirects, and I would rather be safe (relatively) than to be the first to release a fancy new feature and use our plugin users as guinea pigs.
