Is there any SEO benefit to pulling a picture from another website and linking to it from a blog?

[MountainMedia]

For example, if blog.mountainmedia.com were to link a product picture directly to mountainmedia.com. Would this be considered a high quality backlink?

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Federico,

I'm sorry but I don't think I agree that someone should nofollow links to themselves, particularly in the example given in the question by James.

If you overdo it, you should just stop overdoing it rather than adding nofollow to the links. Google are fine with you cross linking between your subdomain and main domain as long as it makes sense for the user and isn't manipulative.

Cheers.

Paddy

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi James,

Yes there would be some SEO benefit for the website that receives the links via the photo. Google and other search engines can crawl links within images and can certainly pass some link equity to the target website. There is some debate as to whether this is as strong as a standard anchor text link, but I wouldn't worry too much about that.

In terms of whether it's high quality or not, in the example you gave of linking from your own sub-domain, this is probably not going to be perceived as high quality when compared to links from other external websites that you do not own. So you should also be focusing on getting quality external links too.

I hope that helps.

Paddy

[FedeEinhorn]

Yes, it will carry pagerank and count as an offsite backlink. However, if you overdo it, you can get a manual penalty. Instead, I would go with a nofollow tag within those links and wait to see if you can earn quality links from external sources.