I’ve found that my church’s website has been linked from fark.com. They were discussing a news story about a kid getting killed on a merry go round. The church’s photo album has a picture of some kids on a merry go round, so they embedded that picture in their discussion. Just doing that link has put 4,000 more hits on the church’s site (at least through people viewing that picture). I’m sure they found the picture through Google’s image search. You can find just about anything on Google.
I’m slightly amused by it (since Fark is a favorite website of mine), but feel as though it could potentially be disruptive, especially if the picture got photoshopped in some weird fashion. So I’m blocking the Google imagebot through robots.txt. That should do it.
Postscript (2/1/04): We got about 4,016 hits on January 20th (the day we were linked from Fark). Whereas we normally get about 300 hits per day. Behold the power of Fark.