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
-
Image upload SEO tips?
Is there anything I can do to my images other than naming them correctly to have with SEO? Size? File type? Maybe adding text on top of them to pick up OCR? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd030 -
Bulk reverse image search?
Hi, i have a couple fashion clients who have very active blogs and post lots of fashion content and images. Like 50+ images weekly. I want to check if these images have been used by other sources in bulk, are there any good reverse image search tools which can do this? Or any recommended ways to efficiently do this for a large number of images? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | snj_cerkez0 -
Technical SEO
Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
SEO Monthly Strategy
Out of curiosity, do any Mozzers use a monthly spreadsheet style SEO strategy that is set on a daily basis like this: Day 1 - purchase/write 3 articles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fertilefrog
Day 2 - comment on 5 blogs
Day 3 - upload article 1
Day 4 - directory submissions
Day 5 - blog promotion
Day 6 - etc..... If so, do you find this to be the most effective way of working, with this rigid structure?0 -
Yoast Seo Plugin
When I view html code of our website, I see this from yoast plugin this. I guess there is really something wrong, especially the page 2? Why so many meta? When ask the support team of the plugin, the developer said me that it is caused by the theme. <html xmlns="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a>" lang="<a class="attribute-value">en-US</a>"><head><meta http-equiv="<a class="attribute-value">Content-Type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">text/html; charset=UTF-8</a>" /><meta name="<a class="attribute-value">google-site-verification</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">hRZ9ZRlCURkbiJA5Ewf6VJlSfGZipdXnumAKlHcrHaQ</a>" /><title>Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidaystitle><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">stylesheet</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/themes/decorum/style.css](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/themes/decorum/style.css)" type="<a class="attribute-value">text/css</a>" media="<a class="attribute-value">screen</a>" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" type="<a class="attribute-value">application/rss+xml</a>" title="<a class="attribute-value">RSS Feed</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/feed/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/feed/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">pingback</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/xmlrpc.php](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/xmlrpc.php)" /><meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Indian Ocean Villas in Kenya, Diani Beach Resort. Find Diani beach Accommodation and Information for Luxury Beach Holidays in Kenya</a>"/><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">next</a>" href="[http://villasdiani.com/page/2/](view-source:http://villasdiani.com/page/2/)" /><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">author</a>" href="[https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts](view-source:https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts)"/><link rel="<a class="attribute-value">publisher</a>" href="[https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts](view-source:https://plus.google.com/u/0/108558298587711226912/posts)"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:locale</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">en_US</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:type</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">website</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:title</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidays</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:description</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Kenya Diani Beach Villas, Luxury Villa Rentals</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:url</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://villasdiani.com/</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:site_name</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">Villas Diani | Kenya Luxury Beach Holidays</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">article:publisher</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">https://www.facebook.com/VillasDianiBeach</a>"/><meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:image</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://villasdiani.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/alfajiri-cliff-villa-diani-kenya.jpg</a>"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0 -
SEO vs 301
I have a website about "Download of games" and im planning open one about "games online" i know that "games online" its super hard to get good ranks, soo im thinking and do a 301 from my website of "download games" to my new website, do you think that is a good strategy ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nafera21