The other day, I happened to check a top-100 site list according to traffic from a certain blog-tracking site. There were only two anime blogs in the entire list and one was in the top-10 with 4500 unique hits in a day. Now, I know some of the big-dog, long-time anime bloggers out there likely easily pass this and might even consider that amount of traffic to be a very slow day. For me, who’s still a small fish in a giant ocean, 4500 uniques is something I’m striving for but still have a ways to go to get there.

Anyway, I thought I’d check out this blog to see what they were doing and how long they’d been around. I was stunned to learn that the blog only had roughly 30 entries, updated only a few times a month, and the entire blog was nothing but “free images” or “free wallpaper.” Initially, I couldn’t figure out what might be driving so much traffic to this blog. After all, while people are always looking for various anime-related images, this guy didn’t have enough images to account for this kind of traffic. Although his blog is registered on a ton of blog-listing/ranking sites, that too is not enough to account for a lot of traffic, especially since those things don’t generate a much traffic.

I watched the blog’s unique hits and one day it jumped to over 5000 and then the next day dropped to 3800. Still, a lot of traffic.

Because I like to solve problems, I decided I’d check the blog further by checking the code. It was then that I noticed that the images on the front page were coming from an image-storage site. OK, nothing wrong with that. Technically, every image I upload to my blog goes to Google’s image-storage site. However, as I went through page by page, I started noticing some images MIA, with place-holder images instead indicating borrowed images. Sure enough, every image on his blog came from a 3rd-party, either an image-storage place or from someone’s domain.

Then I realized how his blog was getting so much traffic. Let’s say he created a post for Clannad wallpapers, then displayed six of them in his post. All six come from six different sites. Lets say that some of these sites generate a lot of traffic on their own. Now, one of their images (your’s for example) is on someone else’s blog or site and so when a person does an image-search, that image may appear in the search, but rather than the person following it to your site, they follow it to the stealer’s site. Thus, your bandwidth has been used, but the traffic goes to his blog.

So for those of you with your own domains, you might check your image usage stats to see if they are being pulled to other sites. In addition to saving you bandwidth, it will stop your traffic from being siphoned off.