I have an affiliate site which gets products from 10's of merchants in my niche and compares them, filters them. Some products have reviews, other just user comments, etc.
Lately, google started to penalize affiliate sites, and many of my competing sites dropped heavily in the last year.
So I am trying to prevent this, and I know it's a machine which analyzes my site at the end.
One step I want to take is not hotlink the images provided by the merchants.
I cannot save them all to the filesystem since they are so many, so I am thinking of another thing. This is where I need your opinion:
Instead of having:
<a href="hotlinkedMerchantImage.html">Product Image</a>
I would have something like this:
<a href="myimage.php">My image</a>
The php script would pull the merchant image, load it temporarily, and serve it to the user, until he closes the browser.
This would be a blend of php and javascript I believe, but I am not sure it will serve my purpose.
If it were you, how would you do this? How would you avoid downloading hundreds of images to the filesystem and not hotlink