...Is there any? If I allow all of the images on my site to be hotlinked, and say thousands of people post them in forums, on blogs, etc. All of the images are being served from images.mydomain.com. Will images.mydomain.com get any PR because of this? Could hotlinked images be considered 'votes' by G and other major search engines - Has anyone encountered anything like this before?
Actually yes... The more people embed your image on their sites the higher your image will rank in Google Images.
Magda, let's just say for the sake of argument that bandwidth is not an issue. TheRazor5, that's interesting. Is that how Google Images works, they determine the rank of an image by the number of times it's been embedded? Do you have any proof of this? Any other info on this would be much appreciated - Thanks for the responses thus far, definitely interesting stuff.
Yes I test everything before I actually talk about it... it's not a supposition, it's simply one of the systems google uses to rank images. No that's not the only factor they use.
As far as link value goes though - Has anyone seen anything that would indicate that many people embedding images from your domain would be factored into Google's algorithm - Could these possibly count as some sort of backlink?
I'm not sure I understand the question. But... If site A references an image that lives on site B, if anything that would be a backlink for the image URL on site B. It's not going to help any of the 'page' URLs on site B rank in any way. Remember, Google and the other search engines index URLs... they rank URLs... they count backlinks for URLs... not sites or even pages.
Canonical, I've seen speculation that some of the link value goes back to the top level domain though. So say I had a .com with no backlinks, but tons of people hotlinking images, say thousands of them. Do you think that the .com would remain a PRNA?
Until now I haven't seen any differences in Google listings according to tha only on the image engine.
Interesting. So most of you feel that the only advantage to allowing hotlinking would be that your images list higher in images.google.com? But at the same time, when people click on those images, it takes them to the site that hotlinked the image, not your own site. Hmm... Potential solutions to this: There's a way to setup a script so that if a user comes from Google/Yahoo/MSN Images, and right clicks on the image, they see something like this (right click that image). The post that outlines this method suggests that you set a cookie upon arrival that expires after 1 hour, so that if the visitor likes your site and sticks around, you don't upset them with the JS stuff. Unfortunately the link to the script itself is broken... There's also the "cloaked landing page" method. When a user clicks on an image in Google Images (on the actual image, instead of just viewing the page it's on), they're shown a landing page instead of the image by itself. You can put whatever we wanted on that landing page (so people could actually use this to monetize indexed images with ads) - You could provide a small html box above the image that contains linkback code. This is done by adding a few lines to .htaccess and using a small .php file. The code in .htaccess tells the server to rewrite the URL ending in .jpg to the script.php file, which obviously displays the .jpg file, in addition to whatever else we want. Also, script.php checks the HTTP REFERER, so if they're not coming from an image search, it just displays the image normally.
I'm sorry. I may have mis-spoken. Told you I wasn't sure if I understood what you were asking. I followed the link above to the image and right clicked it. It gives people the HTML below that they can paste onto their site. If someone were to paste this anchor onto their website creating a clickable image then YES... this would most definitely benefit the page at http://www.mad4mobilephones.com/news/517/ and be counted as a valid backlink to that URL. It would pass PR to http://www.mad4mobilephones.com/news/517/. The image's alt text "Samsung P110" would be considered the link text for the backlink. So it should positively affect the ranking of http://www.mad4mobilephones.com/news/517/ for the keyword phrase "Samsung P110", keyword phrases containing "Samsung P110", and to a lesser degree other keyword phrases containing the single keywords "Samsung" or "P110".
I concur. we have been testing this extensively recently, image optimisation and both using hotlinking from friend's sites and hosting the image ourselves. what happens is that when we hotlink to someone else's images it initially ranks on our site and draws the traffic through there to start with, see random traffic as the latest example. but what (usually) happens a few weeks later is that Google works out the image isnt on our site and starts showing the image on the host site, but the image results stay. see Island ladies optimized for the latest round up post on this. and yes you can drive sh*tloads of image traffic, but ultimately what's that worth? its like social media, quick hit and bounce. maybe 1 in 50 might look at a second page, its pretty useless.
again I agree, there doesnt appear to be any direct SEO benefits weve seen, by way of linkjuice etc to the host sites in the normal SERP, just bucketloads more traffic when the image reverts back to them in Google images.
Canonical, that wasn't what I was originally asking =) This is stuff I've come across since asking my original question. Originally I was wondering the SEO value (if any) of straight up hotlinks. The stuff I posted that you responded to were methods of getting backlinks out of potential hotlinkers. I know that if people linked to my pages using that code, then it's a valid backlink that actually counts, but from what I've gathered, there is no SEO value from hotlinked images without links back to your page.
Exactly... until there enjoy insane amounts of traffic... and you can keep on rotating the site showing the image very easily and keep an unlimited stream of consistent traffic to your sites. I got over 1000 visitors in a month to a brand new site just by optimizing one image to rank there. For assassins creed xbox 360, which doesn't seem like a hugely searched keyword.