Google Image Search and hotlinking

[Tux Kapono]

I'm trying to solve a mystery here... any detective assistance would be greatly appreciated.

A couple of months ago I had some major bandwidth hits, and it
turned out I had some foreign news site hotlinking my images, so I enabled hotlink protection. Previously, 80% of my file type traffic on my site came from jpgs. That number dropped to 40% soon after, but web traffic overall was steady. Then a few days ago web traffic dropped 40% altogether after years of consistency. Also, now I can't find any of my 1000+ images on my site via Google Image Search, but I can find my images on other people's sites. Is all of this related? It sure seems so...

I happen to use CPanel. Does enabling Hotlinking AND checking
'Allow direct requests (ie. entering the url to an image in your
browser)' enable Google to display my images in its Image Search results? I did NOT have 'Allow direct requests' checked all this time.

[leftybogs]

maybe they use robots for not to crawl those images by SEs bots...