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
-
Lazy loading images
Hello, Currently we are working on a new website. Within this new website we have the option to lazy load the images. My question regarding this: will this cause any SEO problems? Will google detect / see all images properly? If not, how can we make sure that google does? Thanks in advance! Remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD0 -
WordPress Themes and SEO
I am helping out a client with updating their website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cangelmarketer
The theme they currently have hasn't been updated in ages (I am going to guess years). Would there be a difference in updating to the most recent version of their theme and changing them to a completely different theme? Or because they update in the current theme is so large anyway, it won't make a difference in terms of SEO. The reason I ask is that they don't know their Themeforest details to log in and download the most recent version of the theme, so they would have to re-purchase it, and with the hosting, they have access to a range of themes includes in their package. Thanks0 -
Google does not index image sitemap
Hi, we put an image sitemap in the searchconsole/webmastertools http://www.sillasdepaseo.es/sillasdepaseo/sitemap-images.xml it contains only the indexed products and all images on the pages. We also claimed the CDN in the searchconsole http://media.sillasdepaseo.es/ It has been 2 weeks now, Google indexes the pages, but not the images. What can we do? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Image impressions fall drastically
Hi everyone, On June 15th, 2015 we saw a huge drop(70%) in image impressions and clicks for website: http://www.zakoopi.com/ What can be the possible reason for that? Please let me know what can be done to improve the impressions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Tools for Content Audit
Hi i'm looking for a tool which can do a full content audit for a site for instance - Find pages which: • Lack text content. • Finds pages with lengthy meta descriptions • Finds missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags . • Duplicate meta descriptions. • Find images with no alt text Are there any tools besides the ones on SEMOZ which can enable me to do a full content audit on factors like these. Or any SEO audit tools out there which you can recommend. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Hyphen domain effect SEO?
Hi Guys, I am looking to buy some domain that have the keyword I want in - but my question is; Does using hypehns in a domain effect your SEO? Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Can Javascript be SEO friendly?
Is some Javascript SEO friendly? I know that Google Webmaster Guidelines states you should avoid the use of Javascript, (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769), but does any one know if Google can read some Javascript or generally not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0