I know that text links will pass PageRank to another site, but what about images? For example, lets say that abc.com contains the following code: <img src="http://www.xyz.com/image.gif"> Code (markup): Will abc.com pass pagerank to website xyz.com?
Image hosting sites have a pretty decent PR so it might pass some PR. However a "normal" text link has more power. At least I think so.
No, there would have to be a direct hyperlink to the actual site... see example below. <a href="http://www.site.com"><img src="http://www.site.com/1203.jpg"></a> Code (markup):
Correct. The search crawlers can only go where you can go, can you click the static image and go to the site the image is hosted on; nope. This is nothing more than hotlinking a image.
I would say they do add power to the site hosting.. but that would be for the image search itself... I believe they do pass pagerank actually... Not hard to do in their image search algorythm. Just treat it like an anchor tag...
What you believe and what are proven facts are two seperate things. In HTML mark-up a static image hyperlink is not a pass through method to another site.
Would the following pass page rank? <a href="http://www.site.com"><img src="http://www.site.com/1203.jpg"></a> Code (markup):
Yes, like I told you earlier. That is considered an outbound link since it can be followed the site directly; this is common HTML mark-up.
What if they host the image and a hyperlink is embeded in the comments section of the images EXIF/etc data ?
I get hotlinked almost everyday, but I assume it doesn't pass any PR or link juice, because I see no increments in the SERP after very relevant hotlinks. EG: Just to be safe, optimise my images and so when someone hotlinks to a image, the image has keywords related to my page from where the image was linked from.. eg someone will link to my site with an image name anjelina-jolie to my site angelinajolie.com Problem is, 1) the hot linked image is an IMG SRC link 2) even if the IMG src were to pass some juice because of <a href="http://www.site.com"><img src="http://www.site.com/1203.jpg"></a> , more often than not the links goes to something like site.com/content/wp-upload which is not a page of any relevance to the website... One thing I do is to write politely to the webmaster to give credit with a Image source/courtesy text link.. As for getting a serp in the google image search, itis exactly the opposite.. usually the hotlinker gets a better serp than the original source.... http://www.xarj.net/2007/image-hotlinking-google-image-search/