Is Facebook leeching images from other sites? (facebookexternalhit/1.0 )

I noticed in my logs over the last couple of days entries with the agent value “facebookexternalhit/1.0 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)”, where all that is being accessed from my site is an image file.

To me this is a concern. It indicates Facebook is using material from my site in their site possibly without permission.

The problem is I don’t think there would be any problem if there were two way traffic, but all I see is Facebook using the material from other sites. I watched the other day as a person shared a link from my blog. Facebook automatically, without the user doing anything, included a picture from my blog in the Facebook site. The more material Facebook includes in their site the less likely people are to visit the source site to find out more information.

There is a trend with the major online businesses to use the material from others’ sites in their own site. Google does this in their search engine where people can see an image of the site without leaving Google.

If you have a small business you want and need others to visit your site. If all Facebook does is use a copy of material from your site in their own site, the chances of any traffic to your site diminishes to almost zero. You also have no idea how your images are being used on the Facebook site.

Since I’ve not seen any traffic coming from Facebook after many dozens of copies of my image being used, I felt the best thing to do was to block Facebook IP’s from using my site. So far I’ve identified the IP ranges of 69.171.*.* and 66.220.*.*. If you’re using a cPanel based hosting site you can easily block access to your site for a given range of IP address.

Before blocking sites you should review your logs and make sure you’re potentially not losing traffic generated by the online services. Services like Facebook which use your material without giving a benefit in return for me is an easy decision to block. They are simply using your material created at your expense for their own benefit.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au