Infographics Links could get discounted in the future

[Michael-Goode]

Hey guys,

I read this article this morning on SEL. Not sure what to think about it.. Matt did have a point that a lot of infographics are of bad quality (even with wrong information present at times) , and hence don't deserve to gain links from it. But how could Google possible know whether the infographic itself is of high quality or not??

http://searchengineland.com/cutts-infographic-links-might-get-discounted-in-the-future-127192

[MarieHaynes]

One of the issues Matt had was if the infographic sneakily linked back to the main site.  (I.e. the embed code linked the image back to the site).

Ross Hudgens has a good article on infographics being devalued.  One of his main points is to link back to your site with your url/brand as opposed to anchor text.

[RyanKent]

As with other forms of content, Infographics can be good or bad, organic or manipulative.

But how could Google possible know whether the infographic itself is of high quality or not??

Speculating on the methods Google uses or may use in the future to detect manipulation is more of a black hat discussion. Keep in mind Google owns YouTube so they understand a great deal about videos. They clearly have access to OCR technology as well, although it is not currently being used in search algorithms to the best of my knowledge.

The can also detect if a high percentage of infographics offer the same link via the same code, it is likely the site owner provided the code and the link would have less value then if users manually added links themselves. Of course sharing this information will simply lead to black hat techniques whereby the publishing site varies the code upon page refresh.