Does image hotlinking pass Google PR?

Quite often i see images from my website hotlinked on forums and blogs etc, and am just wondering if hotlinking of images passes any PR back to my website?

Has anyone ever written about this?

 

i did not have experience about that but i dont think that the pr will pass with that way

 

Yes. It's a link. Links don't have to be text-based to pass PR.

 

I suppose the image gets the PR
But no, your pages will not gain because there is no link to the page.

 

Interesting question. I'd like to know this as well. Does alternate text mean anything?

 

I would say it it does hold some value, specially if the ALT tag has relative text. Other them that, it's just one more link.

 

But technically there is no link as the image would be embedded with the SRC attribute.

Do the spiders and imperticular googlebot class images as dead ends or have they been known to crawl through onto the hotlinked website?

 

Exactly.

Things that are in the ALT tag are considered as 'anchor text', hence it is important to use the ALT tag with images. The way how Google sees hotlinked images can be checked by browsing Google's cache (text-only version) of any website with hotlinked image. In fact, there will be only text (if used ALT tag), but no image.

-T

 

They are just stealing the image from your site. I don't think it's a real link.