Flickr v. On-Site Images
-
My apologies in that I have searched for this, have seen discussions on it and haven't seen a definitive answer on the question of hosting & displaying on-domain images v. using a source like flickr to host all of your images.
I have a client that is mostly a local search play in a very tourism heavy area.
I'm investigating this option for a few reasons. 1. Ease of use. The new flickr app is brilliant. So if he's out giving a tour, takes a picture, it can be seamlessly integrated to his account & then shot off to all of his portals (website, facebook, twitter, etc.). It's a small client & he's not tech savvy, so this option suits him very well.
2. SEO. With all of the tagging, geo components, and it playing nice with Google Images search, I thought this was a viable option in hosting the majority of his on-site images.
I've seen opinions on this before. But I was wondering if there any further opinions on the subject. Not sure if there's anything 'definitive', but any help or insight would be appreciated.
-
For frequent posting this would be fine. For your main site images - you should focus on optimizing those separately and self host them.
Create a guide to using the Flickr app for your client so the client can generate and post these images when they want to with real content - their actual thoughts at the moment.
The goal of the guide would be not using the Flickr App, but using it to achieve the client's goal which you are facilitating. When your client takes pics, then they will be posted with useful parameters, metas, tags, and naming conventions. If you need to adjust them later you can always do that.
You can use a Flickr image or gallery to build content around on the site and link social posts to that page. This is what will help get your images ranked. You could self host a main category image on a category page about a spot and then build your content use Flickr images so the most relevant image will be your self hosted image if you optimize properly.
More benefits include ensuring fast loading images and good participation from your client which is what will matter in the end, with the pics being the same either way.
-
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this isn't the issue I'm having. We actually DO have capable images to use & it's really just a matter of whether we want to host them on-site or using flickr.
Thanks for your help!
-
Hi Brian,
I pride myself on my work and I'm sure you do as well stick with the small cost of stock photos. I recently found a companys similar to I stock photo for much less money. Give a look on Google for some of those. If I had the name which would just look for I would give you it but I can't seem to find it. However I stopped window has decent prices as well.
there are too many variables using Flickr images that are not taken by yourself, your client or a professional you hired for the job. My opinion is stick with stock and just so you know it's been proven that illustrations are far more effective than photographs. So you might want to throw some those things well.
I hope I was of help to you,
Thomas
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
-
Site appears to rank very low
Hi, A site we manage is ranking very low for it's main key phrases. The site is www.moremouse.com. For example for the phrase "orlando vacation rentals" it ranks around page 12 which seems very low considering the DA, PA, links, etc. compared to many sites ranking much much higher. Can anyone see anything obvious that is causing it to rank so low? Thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | QbicIS0 -
Integrate a blog within an existing site
Hello everyone! I work on a website of a very small company and so far no one has ever implemented (not even thought about) a proper content strategy. The only content on the site are products description. Through Analytics I discovered lots of opportunities and topics to be covered which would massively increase the traffic, increase the engagement and (hopefully) sales. Problem is that I don't really know how to integrate a blog into the existing site; my first thought was wordpress What is the best way to do it?
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Locating broken links on site?
Hey guys, I'm using Screaming Frog to help locate some broken links on a client's site and I've managed to pick up two. However, I can't seem to find whereabouts they're located on the site in order to fix them! Is there a way I can do this? Cheers!
On-Page Optimization | | Webrevolve0 -
Image Tags And Titles
Hi, I am currently revamping my website with a new look. Some questions i have with regards to the images found on a page. I know that we need an alt tag for each image. This should not be keyword spammed. However, what about the title tag for the image? What is the best practice for image title tags? Should it be the same as the alt tag? Should it be different? Should I leave it blank? If I am running a wordpress platform for my website. The defaulted settings for wordpress is that all images inside a post are clickable. When clicked, the page loads from abcdef.com/page/ to abcdef.com/page/image.jpg. This seems to be generating alot of internal links but I don't see the value of loading an image when my visitors click on that. Should I let the image be clickable or remove the link on the image for best SEO practices? Thanks for your advice. paul
On-Page Optimization | | paulgian1 -
Large Site - Advice on Subdomaining
I have a large news site - over 1 million pages (have already deleted 1.5 million) Google buries many of our pages, I'm ready to try subdomaining http://bit.ly/dczF5y There are two types of content - news from our contributors, and press releases. We have had contracts with the big press release companies going back to 2004/5. They push releases to us by FTP or we pull from their server. These are then processed and published. It has taken me almost 18 months, but I have found and deleted or fixed all the duplicates I can find. There are now two duplicate checking systems in place. One runs at the time the release comes in and handles most of them. The other one runs every night after midnight and finds a few, which are then handled manually. This helps fine-tune the real-time checker. Businesses often link to their release on the site because they like us. Sometimes google likes this, sometimes not. The news we process is reviews by 1,2 or 3 editors before publishing. Some of the stories are 100% unique to us. Some are from contributors who also contribute to other news sites. Our search traffic is down by 80%. This has almost destroyed us, but I don't give up easily. As I said, I've done a lot of projects to try to fix this. Not one of them has done any good, so there is something google doesn't like and I haven't yet worked it out. A lot of people have looked and given me their ideas, and I've tried them - zero effect. Here is an interesting and possibly important piece of information: Most of our pages are "buried" by google. If I dear, even for a headline, even if it is unique to us, quite often the page containing that will not appear in the SERP. The front page may show up, an index page may show up, another strong page pay show up, if that headline is in the top 10 stories for the day, but the page itself may not show up at all - UNTIL I go to the end of the results and redo the search with the "duplicates" included. Then it will usually show up, on the front page, often in position #2 or #3 According to google, there are no manual actions against us. There are also no notices in WMT that say there is a problem that we haven't fixed. You may tell me just delete all of the PRs - but those are there for business readers, as they always have been. Google supposedly wants us to build websites for readers, which we have always done, What they really mean is - build it the way we want you to do it, because we know best. What really peeves me is that there are other sites, that they consistently rank above us, that have all the same content as us, and seem to be 100% aggregators, with ads, with nothing really redeeming them as being different, so this is (I think) inconsistent, confusing and it doesn't help me work out what to do next. Another thing we have is about 7,000+ US military stories, all the way back to 2005. We were one of the few news sites supporting the troops when it wasn't fashionable to do so. They were emailing the stories to us directly, most with photos. We published every one of them, and we still do. I'm not going to throw them under the bus, no matter what happens. There were some duplicates, some due to screwups because we had multiple editors who didn't see that a story was already published. Also at one time, a system code race condition - entirely my fault, I am the programmer as well as the editor-in-chief. I believe I have fixed them all with redirects. I haven't sent in a reconsideration for 14 months, since they said "No manual spam actions found" - I don't see any point, unless you know something I don't. So, having exhausted all of the things I can think of, I'm down to my last two ideas. 1. Split all of the PRs off into subdomains (I'm ready to pull the trigger later this week) 2. Do what the other sites do, that I believe create little value, which is show only a headline and snippet and some related info and link back to the original page on the PR provider website. (I really don't want to do this) 3. Give up on the PRs and delete them all and lose another 50% of the income, which means releasing our remaining staff and upsetting all of the companies and people who linked to us. (Or find them all and rewrite them as stories - tens of thousands of them) and also throw all our alliances under the bus (I really don't want to do this) There is no guarantee this is the problem, but google won't tell me, the google forums are crap, and nobody else has given me an idea that has helped. My thought is that splitting them off into subdomains will have a number of effects. 1. Take most of the syndicated content onto subdomains, so its not on the main domain. 2. Shake up the Domain Authority 3. Create a million 301 redirects. 4. Make it obvious to the crawlers what is our news and what is PRs 5. make it easier for Google News to understand Here is what I plan to do 1. redirect all PRs to their own subdomain. pn.domain.com for PRNewswire releases bw.domain.com for Businesswire releases etc 2. Fix all references so they use the new subdomain Here are my questions - and I hope you may see something I haven't considered. 1. Do you have any experience of doing this? 2. What was the result 3. Any tips? 4. Should I put PR index pages on the subdomains too? I was originally planning to keep them on the main domain, with the individual page links pointing to the actual release on the subdomain. Obviously, I want them only in one place, but there are two types of these index pages. a) all of the releases for a particular PR company - these certainly could be on the subdomain and not on the main domain b) Various category index pages - agriculture, supermarkets, mining etc These would have to stay on the main domain because they are a mixture of different PR providers. 5. Is this a bad idea? I'm almost out of ideas. Should I add a condensed list of everything I've done already? If you are still reading, thanks for hanging in.
On-Page Optimization | | loopyal0 -
New Site + Transfered blog: Things to watch for?
Hey everyone. So here is what's going on. 1. Built new website. Will be using generally the same URL's as original. 2. Incorporated and expanded on a previously separate informative blog. a. Many articles contain very similar if not the same articles as our blog. 3. The blog will be taken down as soon as new site is put online. So my question is just. Could someone list the like top 5 important things I need to keep in mind before putting this website live? I don't mind searching forums and blogs for the how-to part; I just need to know what I should be thinking about and getting done pre-launch. I believe re-directing the blog articles should be done? Create and submit sitemap? Thanks, Web-creation newb
On-Page Optimization | | Earthsaver0 -
Site Speed Expert Referral Needed
We're looking for someone who can diagnose some site speed issues AND adjust the code, servers, etc. as needed. Does anyone know of an expert in this area?
On-Page Optimization | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0 -
Site structure for services and blog articles
Hi, looking for some advice on the structure for a relatively small site (around 200 pages). I'd like a structure where we can talk about our services as well as write blog articles on topics that relate to our services. We'll have loads more content in the blog area than in the services area. I was thinking of this: option 1: /services /services/copywriting
On-Page Optimization | | JaspalX
/services/social-media
/services/press-releases etc. and categories for articles where we'd give tips, talk about trends etc. /copywriting
/social-media
/effective-press-releases
etc. would it be better to have a different structure, say: option 2: /copywriting
/copywriting/services
/copywriting/articles OR option 3: /copywriting-services
/copywriting-blog OR option 4: /services/copywriting
/blog/copywriting OR is there another, better way perhaps? Of course the internal anchor text links to the services/blog articles pages will be tuned to try and make it clear what each section is about i.e. our services vs. industry trends/comments/tips for the blog.0