A hugely popular website is leeching one of my site pics. It shows up as a link in Yahoo Explorer. Does Google count that as a real link? Will pr flow through it? I'm guessing no... So is it time to change the pic and teach them a lesson, or do I leave it? Thanks! Boog
Actually, I think it counts as a link. Its a sign of popularity that the search engines can read and in my experience images that are displayed on multiple pages/domains rank higher in Google image results.
I don't see any reason why it will count as a backlink. It's not a link after all, they're just using your sources. So I would change it with the image of a middle finger.
Real link = Permanent Anchor Text (Good Anchor Text). You better check them. IMHO, rather than changing your site pic, it is better you restrict their IP from accessing your site by configuring your httpd.conf.
Is the only link back to your site the photo of yours they are using, or did the include a "photo from xxxx blog" link where this is used? If they haven't provided a link back to you, they're getting most of the benefits and you're getting your image leached. I would suggest contacting them first, let them know you're glad they found your image so useful but that you would really appreciate a text link back to your site, or that you will have to consider removing the image due to bandwidth issues. Hopefully if you're nice about it, so will they, and you'll gain the benefit of a text link from a "hugely popular website", which is priceless. It's also a mutually beneficial solution. If they can't be bothered to give you a link back for using your content in a reasonable amount of time, I would go with the suggestion of replacing that photo with something obnoxious (a middle finger was mentioned above).