The above image is one that allouttabubblegum.com uses to prevent hotlinking. Ironically, this anti-hotlinking image is itself hotlinked from level60design.com.

Even more lol-a-riffic is the increasingly common use of watermarks, especially when the watermarking site is not the original creator of the content.

Let's see what these pricks at AOBG say when I upload their image to 9GAG et al.

Thats 9gag, reddit, shutterstock, memegenerator.net, dudeLOL, damnLOL, and icanhazcheezburger. Mother of God.

But at least I'm not hotlinking their image anymore!

Does watermarking mess with reverse image search? I hope not!

I've found that, generally, making small alterations to an image such as captioning and watermarking do NOT hinder reverse image search, but it may lead to problems if the altered version becomes much more common on the web than the base image.

In the case of captioned memes you'll often get matches which are different instances of the same meme; that is, the same base image but with different captions. Google doesn't seem to have a notion yet of meme templates, so other instances of a meme are just as valid a match as the template itself. Perhaps moreso if the text of the two captions seem more similar to each other (on the basis of pseudo-visual analysis) than either is to the template.

Thanks, that's good to know.

I usually use the 9gag watermark as a signal that the content is not worth LOL'ing at.

Bonus LOL at the 9gag URL you ripped off: http://9gag.com/gag/5529814