Hi, I am looking to add images to each of my blog posts on a new blog. I noticed that others tend to include an image with each post and have read that this can help your SEO. I have concerns with using images (paid or free) that I have found on the web. It seems to me that any image you can get on the web (especially the free ones), would be used by many other people already. I know that Google does not appreciate duplicate content. What is your experience with this? Should I grab an image that is already well used? Has anyone been penalized for this? If the image is found elsewhere already, is it even worth the effort? Would it be a good idea to modify the image slightly using a tool like gimp so that maybe big G can't tell that it is the same?
Image search is not so advanced yet. Maybe in the future we will see something like the panda for images bur for now it's ok to use free images.
Google unable to crawl image content, unless you set ALT-IMG to notice what google all about the image content. So it fine to use same image but don't use too much image in one article while Google is hard to define the image is related to your content or not.
Well that is somewhat comforting. I think I will go ahead and throw a free image on each of my posts and see how it works out. Thanks for the info!