Images and SEO
-
Hi,
I would like some opinions on the topic of using images for SEO.
I have come across a few sites that I see have very few backlinks, but have decent pagerank and seem to rank well for certain keywords. One such site I looked at had very little content other than tons of images (It was a joke blog that focussed on funny images, funny pics etc) and now I am starting to question whether hotlinking images assists in SEO? are there any benefits to having someone using one of your images (hosted on your site) ?
I do recall reading somewhere that someone hotlinking an image is akin to a link.
Any truth in this?
-
Thanks for the answer, but If we took pagerank out of the equation and just focus on whether linking to an image provides any type of benefit, would a site be able to rank based on a high number of backlinks to images as opposed to pages?
-
True, if it's a person's website but everything is shared socially now and people do it all the time on FB and it can be a great traffic driver if you force them to paste the URL instead of just the image path.
-
Well hang on a second here before everyone excited about hotlinking helping you in SEO and rankings.
If someone is hotlinking to an image on your site, even if it passes PR the PR is going nowhere because it's an image, not a webpage. There are no links on an image for the PR to pass to the rest of your site.
Optimizing your image with proper name and alt tag will help on page SEO and also help that image rank better in google image searches. If your image ranks good in google image search it could bring traffic to your site. Some shady sites know this and use scripts to automatically redirect the user to their website after clicking on that image in google image search - look at the bullet hole tattoo example
If your site is all about images then i would disable hotlinking and i would watermark all of your images in case someone wants to lift them at least your domain name is on them and you might get type thru traffic while also dicouraging someone from scarping your entire site and stealing your pictures for their site.
-
Maybe if they can't hotlink your images they simply link to you?
or steal your image and host it somewhere else?
It's a toss up. Obviously I would prefer a link, but realistically speaking, the chances of someone linking to your page because they cant embed an image from your site to theirs is pretty slim at best IMO.
-
I do recall reading somewhere that someone hotlinking an image is akin to a link.
I have hotlinking blocked via .htaccess on one of my sites. It's been blocked for years because LOTS of people were hotlinking my images and we use terrabytes of BW without their help. With that in place I don't feel that I have any trouble getting the website to rank.
Maybe if they can't hotlink your images they simply link to you?
-
Forgot to mention that point, thank you Jarno
-
In addition to Jason's comment: Also make sure that if your use habedi (for example) as a keyword that you want to target, make sure you save your image file as habedi.jpg or png or something. But make sure you include that keyword in the file name. It really helps (even if it's just a very very little bit).
Regards
Jarno
-
Yes, images do help in the search engine results and often get displayed as part of an image search, where Google gives you the options of images as your search. However, do make sure that the alt tags are done correctly, and that your link points to something you want to. If you want to fully optimize it add a description and a caption, it never hurts.
The thing to be aware of though, most of the time the images will rank as opposed to the page the image is on. So there is the other half of the coin. Images can always help. Just be careful of where you link it to. Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO audit for ccTLD sites
Hi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSanna
My customer has sites with Country code TLDs (e.g. https://sample.fr, https://sample.fi and https://sample.en) and I'm supposed to perform SEO audit for them. Is there any way to perform audit at the same time for all versions? Can I perform audit e.g. just for https://sample or do I have to run every .fr, .fi and .en separately in multiple tools I use? Thanks much in advance!0 -
AJAX requests and implication for SEO
Hi, I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face: When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page. We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Website Migration and SEO
Recently I migrated three websites from www.product.com to www.brandname.com/product. Two of these site are performing as normal when it comes to SEO but one of them lost half of its traffic and dropped in rankings significantly. All pages have been properly redirected, onsite SEO is intact and optimized, and all pages are indexed by Search engines. Has anyone had experience with this type of migration that could give some input on what a possible solution could be? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexVelazquez0 -
Outbrain Select SEO Implications
A member of our marketing team wants to use Outbrain Select to curate content to augment the original content we have on our site. http://www.outbrain.com/select/how This content would be taken from other pages on the site and shown through as though it is on our site through javascipt. Obviously this page would be setup as a no-index. This seems to me like something Google would frown on. Does anyone know the SEO implications behind using a tool like this? I'm concerned google will see links to a blank page no-index page and find it suspect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LyntonWeb0 -
SEO Ecommerce Keywords
Hi guys got a question regarding ecommerce seo do you think its a better idea to target more long tail terms and try get links directly to product pages, brand pages and categories. Rather than focus on short keywords that do bring in good traffic but are very broad, i will prob do both, but i would like a second opinion please about other users strategies thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Will_Craig0 -
SEO Feedback Please
Hi, I was hoping to get some feedback on this site's SEO: http://www.chantre.com/ I also have different URLs which can be accessed from the left side of the site under "Quick Search Links" that go to the different offices within this company. Thoughts on how to improve would be great. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXe0 -
SEO Company Referral
I am looking for a great US based SEO company referral. I try to do as much as I can on my end but the more I learn, then more I find I need help to do a great job. Lately running the business takes most of my time, and we need a team who really specializes in SEO. Can anyone recommend a SEO company with a great reputation, someone who has done great work for you in the past? I get many people contacting me with SEO promises, but I need some advice from someone with more experience than me. I appreciate all of your insights.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilityhealth0 -
SEO Consultant for site audit
Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0