Have you experienced a sudden drop in visitors through Image Search ?

Post 30 Jan 2013, have you experienced a sudden drop of 20-50% in the number of visitors on your blog ? If you had drilled down further,  you would notice that it is the visitors coming from Image serach which have declined a lot. 

Here is the story, in a new "redesign" of it Image Search, google has started hotlinking the images. In short, google is taking you photographs, and delivering them in full resolution with only a link to your page. As a result, a visitor need not go to the page anymore, and get it from Google itself. A classic case of a Search Engine turned CDN.

So if you are a photo/ travel blogger and do not see 20-30-40-50-60% of your visitors anymore, you can safely blame the giant of Internet.