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Information about Inline Linking

Inline linking is the placing of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located. Inline linking is also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking or bandwidth theft.

Web browsers do not distinguish between an HTML reference for an image on the same server and one on a different server even if it is entirely located on a different site. Both links would be written with the same HTML "tag".

When a web site is visited, the browser first downloads the textual content in the form of an HTML document. The downloaded HTML document may call for other HTML and/or stylesheet files to be processed. These files may contain <img> tags which supply the URLs that allows images to display on the page. Normally, these are "relative" URLs that refer to images on the same server: 
>
HTML also permits absolute URLs that refer to images hosted on other servers: 
>
When a browser downloads an HTML page containing such an image, the browser will contact the remote server to request the image content.

The ability to display content from one site within another is part of the original design of the Web's hypertext medium. There are legitimate uses of inline linking:
  • Web architects may deliberately segregate the images of a site on one server or a group of servers. Hosting images on separate servers allows the site to divide the bandwidth requirements between servers. As an example, the high-volume site Slashdot stores its "front page" at slashdot.org; individual stories on servers such as games.slashdot.org or it.slashdot.org; and serves images for each host from images.slashdot.org.
  • Many web pages include banner ads. Banner ads are images hosted by a company that acts as middleman between the advertisers and the web sites on which the ads appear. The <img> tag may specify an URL to a CGI script on the ad server, including a string uniquely identifying the site producing the traffic, and possibly other information about the person viewing the ad, previously collected and associated with a cookie. The CGI script determines which image to send in response to the request.
The blurring of boundaries between sites can lead to other problems when the site violates users' expectations, as in the case of cross-site scripting. Phishing attacks may embed elements of a legitimate site to gain the confidence of a victim.

This has sometimes been controversial because it is possible that the site where the object is stored and from which it is retrieved will not like the new placement or will consider it to be bandwidth theft: a site owner may incur additional expense for using more bandwidth. Inline linking to an image stored on another site increases the bandwidth use of that site even though the site is not being viewed as intended. Some servers are programmed to use the HTTP referer to detect hot-linking and return a condemnatory message, commonly in the same format, in place of the expected image or media clip.

Forms of hotlinking also include video files, music (or mp3) files, animations (such as Flash). Most types of electronic media are susceptible to inline linking.

Protection

Apache servers can be configured to partially protect hosted media from inline linking, usually by not serving the media or by serving a different file[1]. On Microsoft's Internet Information Services Web servers, there are a number of third party tools available to combat inline linking and hotlinking, including LinkDeny [2] and ColdLink [3].

See also

A Web page or webpage is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext links.
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HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

File extension: .html, .htm
MIME type: text/html
Type code: TEXT
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Uniform Resource Locator (URL) formerly known as Universal Resource Locator, is a technical, Web-related term used in two distinct meanings:
  • In popular usage, many technical documents, it is a synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI);

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Hypertext most often refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext represents a relatively recent innovation to user interfaces, which overcomes some of the limitations of written text.
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This section needs additional to facilitate its .
Please help [ improve this article] by adding reliable references
Unverifiable material may be .
This article has been tagged since July 2007.

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A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking them to the web site of the advertiser.
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The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol for interfacing external application software with an information server, commonly a web server. This allows the server to pass requests from a client web browser to the external application.
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HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server.
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Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications which allow code injection by malicious web users into the web pages viewed by other users. Examples of such code include HTML code and client-side scripts.
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phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and online banks are common targets.
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referer, or HTTP referer, identifies, from the point of view of an internet webpage or resource, the address of the webpage (commonly the URL, the more generic URI or the i18n updated IRI) of the resource which links to it.
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Player support only: GNU/Linux (Intel, x86) and Solaris (Intel, SPARC) [1]
Genre: Multimedia Content Creator
License: Proprietary EULA
Website: Adobe.com's Flash page Adobe Flash, or simply Flash
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Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to simply as Apache, is a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently known as Sun Java
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Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly called Internet Information Server) is a set of Internet-based services for servers using Microsoft Windows. It is the world's second most popular web server in terms of overall websites, behind Apache HTTP Server.
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Deep linking, on the World Wide Web, is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on another website, instead of that website's main or home page. Such links are called deep links.

Example

This link: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.
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Off page optimisation (off-page SEO) are strategies for search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content.
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