Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Digital Marketing
    3. Web Design
    4. How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?

    Web Design
    4
    5
    1731
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • lcourse
      lcourse last edited by

      We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures.

      Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image?

      In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • EGOL
        EGOL last edited by

        Keep in mind that infringers post images on their website without any references to licenses.  They stole the images, why would they point to a license ? !!

        Many of the "free image sources" on the web contain a significant number of infringing images.   Furthermore, many of the websites that sell or license images are offering images that they have no right to offer.  I have found my own images on such sites and have done something about it.

        On many of the free image websites and some of the websites selling images the images are uploaded by "members".  The owners of these sites simply claim "safe harbor" when infringing images are found on their sites.  They simply blame the member and take the images down when someone complains.

        I am not an attorney, but I can say that I would not use your proposed method because a lot of the images that you think are OK are not OK.   Furthermore, the images to which I hold copyright do not have licensing information posted with them because they are not available for license by anyone at any price.  They are for my exclusive use.

        People who are serious about protecting their images from infringement will probably do at least two of the following if they see their images on your website.... DMCA to search engines, DMCA to hosting services, complaint to Adsense, complaint to other revenue sources, send informal notice to you, demand payment for your past use, add your website to the list that their legal team will look into.

        It might be a good idea to make an appointment with an intellectual property attorney and discuss the concepts of copyrights, permissions, licenses, documentation, fair use, safe harbor and how copyright laws vary outside of your home country.  I have had these types of meetings with more than one attorney and found that it is not as expensive as you might fear.  After that meeting you have a person who knows you and can be a quick source of assistance if needed.  Time and money well spent.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • lcourse
          lcourse last edited by

          After some digging here is what we did finally:

          1. researched with tineye.com whether images were from free image sources and that among top results in tineye were no references to licences

          2. additionally we uploaded each image to https://www.picscout.com/ which is a site fully owned by getty images and upon upload indicates whether it finds any licencing information for the image. As picscout has some bad reputation for their practice of exortion letters it is probably best to not submit on their site the URL of images on your own site, but rather use their upload function instead.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • ThompsonPaul
            ThompsonPaul @EGOL last edited by

            Nicely summarised, EGOL.

            My bottom line? If you can't definitively prove you have license for the images, you can't use them.

            And a business model based on "hoping' that the real rights owner won't hammer you into the ground for the infringement is the proverbial Very Bad Idea.

            Paul

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • EGOL
              EGOL last edited by

              If your freelancers obtained "royalty free" images then they will likely have a receipt proving that they paid a fee for each image that was granted a royalty free license.  If they obtained other forms of license or permission they should have that neatly logged in a spreadsheet or in the form of email messages.  That is where I would start with this.

              If you don't have any documentation then it is going to be really hard and really costly to go backwards to determine where each image came from and if proper permissions and licenses were obtained.  That might cost more than doing the work over again.  If I was in this situation, I would start over on this project.

              If you are getting into the business of using the images of others then a good education in copyright, fair use, licensing, permissions, and proper documentation is essential.  In addition to you having this information and knowledge, anyone who works for you must have it because the problems of infringement will be yours and not theirs.  Lots of people run wild and rampant when collecting images for their websites or client websites.  They simply don't understand copyright law or the problem with ignorance.

              Will people get in touch with you before filing a DMCA or filing a copyright infringement lawsuit?   They might or they might not.  If they think that your website is run by scofflaw organization with few assets then they will probably just file DMCAs with search engines and hosting companies.  They might also file complaints to Adsense and other income sources.  Successful DMCA and Adsense complaints will put the infringer out of business.  I make lots of these complaints against infringers and have a system in place to do them quickly and efficiently.

              If your website appears to be run by a substantive company and the person who's images you infringed is a decent and patient, they might send you an informal infringement notice, give you a chance to fix it, and then file DMCA and income source complaints if you don't respond quickly.  Or, they might send you a bill for your past use of the image and a license agreement for use of the image going forward.   If you have stolen a lot of their images or you have a person who stands firmly on their intellectual property, they could go straight to a lawsuit or other legal remedy.

              The owner of the images enjoys the ability to chose their methods of dealing with you.

              ThompsonPaul 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • QBSEO

                What’s the best tool to visualize internal link structure and relationships between pages on a single site?

                I‘d like to review the internal linking structure on my site. Is there a tool that can visualize the relationships between all of the pages within my site?

                Web Design | | QBSEO
                0
              • pastcatch

                Site Migration due to Corporate Acquisition

                Hey everyone, Wanted to check-in on something that I've been thinking way too much about lately. I'll do my best to provide background, but due to some poor planning, it is rather confusing to wrap your head around. There are currently three companies involved, Holding Corp (H Corp) and two operating companies, both in the same vertical but one B2B and the other is B2C. B2C corp has been pushed down the line and we're focusing primarily on H Corp and B2B brand. Due to an acquisition of H Corp and all of it's holdings, things are getting shuffled and Ive been brought in to ensure things are done correctly. What's bizarre is H Corp and it's web property are the dominant authority in SERPs for the B2B brand. As in B2B brand loses on brand searches to H Corp, let alone any product/service related terms. As such, they want to effectively migrate all related content from H Corp site to B2B brand site and handover authority as effectively as possible. Summary: Domain Migration from H Corp site to B2B Brand site. Ive done a few migrations in my past and been brought in to recover a few post-launch so I have decent experience and a trusted process. One of my primary objectives initially is change as little as possible with content, url structure (outside the root) etc so 301s are easy but also so it doesn't look like we're trying to play any games. Here's the thing, the URL structure for H Corp is downright bad from both a UX perspective and a general organizational perspective. So Im feeling conflicted and wanted to get a few other opinions. Here are my two paths as I see and Id love opinions on both: stick with a similar URL structure to H Corp through the migration (my normal process) but deviate from pretty much every best practice for structuring URLs with keywords, common sense and logic. Pro: follow my process (which has always worked in the past) Con: don't implement SEO/On-page best practices at this stage and wait for the site redesign to implement best practices (more work) Implement new URL structure now and deviate from my trusted process. Do you see a third option? Am I overthinking it? Other important details: B2B brand is under-going a site redesign, mostly aesthetic but their a big corporation and will likely take 6-9 months to get up. Any input greatly appreciated. Cheers, Brent

                Web Design | | pastcatch
                1
              • Kingalan1

                Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?

                Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan)  25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space) 
                15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take 
                30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space)  High bounce rate
                3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
                4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
                300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
                300 PAGES  Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words.  My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google  that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan

                Web Design | | Kingalan1
                0
              • dsinger

                Average Time to Conversion on Site

                I am curious to know if there is a way to view or calculate the average time it takes site visitors to convert per session.  For example, based on a current website design, the average time on site might be 3 minutes and the number of conversions might be 100.  is there a way to say that for the current website design, it takes 3 minutes for the average site visitor to submit a web form? Then, as I redesign the site, my goal would be to improve the average time to conversion by making the web form more accessible and require less information within the form itself. I don't think this is currently possible in GA.  Has anyone figured out a way to accomplish this by use of traditional tracking tools?  Or, am I facing having to code my site to record each visitor's time on site from the second they enter and then stop the clock when they submit the form?

                Web Design | | dsinger
                0
              • DRSearchEngOpt

                Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap

                So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing. Question:  Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages.  Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's.  When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc> <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
                hreflang="en-AU"
                href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
                />
                <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
                hreflang="en-NZ"
                href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
                /> Would be the correct way of doing this.  I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links.  I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br> Thanks!

                Web Design | | DRSearchEngOpt
                0
              • Will_Craig

                Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?

                Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks

                Web Design | | Will_Craig
                0
              • GeorgiaSEOServices

                SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?

                I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images.  It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?

                Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices
                1
              • stefanok

                Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help

                Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef

                Web Design | | stefanok
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.