I was curious, if a website links to an image that is on your site (so that the image displays on THEIR website), does it count as a back link? I'm leaning towards YES, but with no anchor text obviously. Why do I think that it counts? Becuase I have a domain that I ONLY use to host images, and I have a LOT of images on that site that has other sites linking to them. Much to my surprise, when I ran my domain name through dnscoop.com, it said that I had 500+ links going to my domain, and since I literally have NO content on my image hosting domain, I know that it is all just links to my image files (especially since I am probably the only person even using the image files, which I use on my different sites). Do these kind of links even help google rankings at all? You would think that they would atleast be worth SOMETHING
Those will count as a link. They probably won't show in google as a backlink...but use yahoo site explorer to really see. Although I just went through some of your backlinks and so far they are all test links! But I would think that has to be a backlink to your site. Your hyperlinking the image right?
good question, but I think google makes it so they aren't worth that much, otherwise sites like imageshack and tinypic would be #1 for so many keywords they should make it count more though if people are coming to your site to hotlink images from
It can still be counted as a backlink if it doesn't have a nofollow tag on their links. It can be counted, but value wise for keywords, it wouldn't count at all.
A link to an image will NOT count as an inbound link to pages on your site. It will count as a backlink to that image only. So it "might" help the image rank in Google's image search... But it does nothing toward making your site's web pages rank in Google.com. If the reference to your image on the other site has an alt= attribute to explain what the image is about and/or if the image file name on your site is keyword rich, then it will help your image rank in Google's image search. However, an image without an alt= attribute is the equivalent of a text link w/ no anchor text. It's not even going to help your image rank in image search without keyword rich URLs for your image and/or an alt= attribute. Go to Google and search for site:yourdomain.com. The URLs you see in the results are the URLs that Google has in their index for your site and the URLs that they will show in the results. Having links to images does not help these URLs rank. If they did then a popular method of on-site/on-page SEO would simply be to link to lots of images on your own site. There are thousands of sites on the web who try to place values on sites, try to emulate what Google or Yahoo! or other search engines might be seeing. But very few have much if any value in this regard. I can tell you that search engines have never counted references to images on your site as a backlink to your site. Search engines don't even rank sites... Hell, they don't even rank web pages. They rank URLs. A reference to an image only has the image's URL. Which page's URL on your site do you think a reference to an image on your site should help rank? Makes no sense to do so. Absolutely not. They don't help the URLs on your site rank at all. The only way a reference to an image (on your site or another) will help a URL for a web page on your site rank is if that image is used as an image link pointing to a URL on your site like: <a href="URLofPageOnYourSite"><img src="URLofImageOnYourSiteOrOtherSite" alt="keyword you want to rank for"></a> AND it contains an alt= attribute with keywords you want to rank for as the alt text.
yes it is counted as your backlink for your site and as zeruel said if it is dofollow, if fact photo sharing is one of the most effective technique of an seo nowadays.
Hmmm Really? Tell me exactly which URL on his site this image counts as a backlink for? <img src="URLofImageOnHisSite"> An <img> element does not tell Google or the other search engines which URL the backlink applies to. The only URL in an <img> element is that of the image itself. You will NEVER see an page on another site listed as a backlink for one of your pages in ANY of the search engines output for the link: operator because of an <img> element that points to an image on your site unless it is an image link (<a href="URLofPageOnYourSite"><img src="URLofImageOnYourSiteOrOtherSite"></a>) pointing to a page on your site. Likewise, you will never see a page on another site listed as a backlink for one of your pages in Google's Webmaster Tools either simply because it has a reference to an image on your site unless it is an image link w/ the href of the <a> element pointing to a page on your site. They are not counted unless it is used for an image link and even then the reference to the image is not what counts as a backlink... It's the href from the anchor element then encloses the <img> element that counts as the backlink. The engines simply take the alt attribute from the <img> as the link text.
so we have conflicting opinions on this one, this is so confusing it is strange because most of the time people link to a site by just using an image, but it is very uncommon for someone to put an actual backlink along with it (unless they are the one that owns the site and are spamming)
When another site links to yours with an image, the link looks like: <a href="URLonYourSite"><img src="URLofAnyImageOnYourSiteOrTheirs" alt="some keyword phrase"></a> This DOES count as a backlink to "URLOnourSite" with "some keyword phrase" as the link text... regardless of whether the image lives on your site or theirs or some other site. The target URL that gets credit for the backlink is the one referenced in the href attribute. But when another site simply references an image on your site with: <img src="URLofImageOnYourSite"> and it's not an image link then this does NOT count as a backlink to any of your pages.
With my expirience I think that Canonical has right...I have some links to images on my site, but they does not count as backlinks...he is explained it very well.
Yes, they do IMO any tyme of linking to your url/domain will count as backlink, but how much weightage those links have with respect to SEO, Only "G" can clarify
Good luck w/ making your site rank by having other sites simply reference an image on your site. 1) You don't have any link text so it's not going to help you rank for any keyword. 2) It's not passing any PR to any URL on yours site because it's not a link to a page on your site, it's a reference to an image. There is a huge difference. The image is not even clickable. 3) Google and the other engines do not rank sites... they rank URLs and the only URL in the <img> element is the URL of the image itself. So there is no way that they could even determine which URL on your site should get credit for the "so called" backlink even if they did consider it a backlink which they do not. You keep thinking that it helps... I'll keep building "real" backlinks that actually show up in LINK: operator searches at the various engines and in Google's webmaster tools... We'll see whose sites actually rank for targeted keyword phrases.
Exactly, and if you had read Canonical's detailed explanation you would have known better than post self-contradictory things like that.