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i ran the above infographic URL in Raven's link checker to look for the amazon URL and it seemed to "count" it as a link....

We use Amazon to host our assets (images, videos, PDFs, etc). These assets can be used across multiple sites we own and we reference them appropriately via our CMS.

example asset URL:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lawgical/assets/data/539/original.png

We have an infographic we recently distributed that is hosted on Amazon. Obviously we want any link value to go back to our primary URL where we laid out the infographic, however some of the infographic sites are just referencing the above source image URL.

Are we losing SEO / link value by not have the infographic hosted on our domain? Do search engines count these image references as a "link"?

For your reference...

Infographic post:

http://www.serve-now.com/articles/841/process-server-vs-sheriff-infographic

Example infographic site usage:

http://www.infographicsposters.com/law-infographics/which-is-better-process-server-or-sheriff

awesome feedback! thanks david. would like to hear your thoughts on proper canonicalization when you have a moment. thanks again.

agreed! we ran into the same problem with content (articles, etc). if you think of it in the same way as blog posts, they each have a unique URL, but with tags (i.e. categories) you are able to get them posted to the appropriate category landing pages.

have a somewhat related issue that i posted here

We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service.

example:

• colorado/denver - main city page
• colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page

There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city.

There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content!

This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together.

We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc.

Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input:

1. Canonicalize

Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1)

2. 301 Redirect

On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls.

We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results.

We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page

Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.

I'm not sure if it was related to postcard delays or not, but Google Places had some outages up until recently. I'd recommend being patient with the postcards as well - you can re-request a PIN, but if you do so and the original card shows up it'll no longer be valid. sigh Phone isnt always an option either - if you're claiming a listing chances are you'll have to wait it out until the card arrives.