Is there SEO value in having images referenced on other sites?

[trentc]

We use Amazon to host our assets (images, videos, PDFs, etc). These assets can be used across multiple sites we own and we reference them appropriately via our CMS.

example asset URL:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lawgical/assets/data/539/original.png

We have an infographic we recently distributed that is hosted on Amazon. Obviously we want any link value to go back to our primary URL where we laid out the infographic, however some of the infographic sites are just referencing the above source image URL.

Are we losing SEO / link value by not have the infographic hosted on our domain? Do search engines count these image references as a "link"?

For your reference...

Infographic post:

http://www.serve-now.com/articles/841/process-server-vs-sheriff-infographic

Example infographic site usage:

http://www.infographicsposters.com/law-infographics/which-is-better-process-server-or-sheriff

[fassa]

Well then it does. I often see images counting as links for many websites.

[trentc]

i ran the above infographic URL in Raven's link checker to look for the amazon URL and it seemed to "count" it as a link....

[AlanMosley]

I have seen a few sites that can not get into the Bing index, that were mainly content hosted elsewhere, like images from amazon, video from youtube, jQuery from other places. After you too all that away there was not much left. So it led me to believe that if it is over down it can be seen as thin content.

[fassa]

Well there are a few aspects to it. When u are hosting your images elsewhere people will find them via google images on amazon. But you still get your links from them.  Or actually you can check whether or not u get any link value with the open site explorer.