Holy server resources and bandwidth suckage Batman! Seriously- hot-linking to your images and media files from search engines and other sites can be a good thing- but also a very bad thing, depending on what it is that being hot-linked and whether or not you want there to be external linking to your file(s).

In the best case scenario, it drives traffic to your site and helps advertise for you, freely. In the worst case scenario you piss off your webhost and in turn have outages.
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