Will copying images from other sites affect SEO rankings?

Interesting one! I really feel good to read this discussion.

 

But I've still not got the exact answer for my question!!!Can anyone tell me in what way will copying images affect my site?

 

Hi Vinodh. Maybe this will provide you with an answer.

I believe your main concern is to restore the traffic you used to get from Google Image Search yes? It has dropped greatly since before. I had a celebrity images website which suffered as well. I used to get 2500 unique visitors per day and that dropped to 400 unique visitors per day. Since then I have taken extra measures to restore the traffic drop. You have to realize that the traffic drop is not because of SEO copyright penalization. It is because of the new Google image search UI. Most websites had a decrease in traffic of 63% from Google Images.

In the old interface clicking on the tumbnail of the image in google images, showed the image in front and center, while the website which had the image was displayed, greyed out in the background:



The new image search however does not load the website in the background. Google says the reason why they did this, was because it decreased load time and hence provided users a better user experience. They load the high resolution version of the image directly.






As you can see with the higher resolution image displayed directly, there is very little need for the users who do an image search to click through to your website. Ever since google rolled out its image search, many website which primarily relied on traffic from google image search took a big hit. This includes, entertainment celebrity websites like mine, recipe websites, fashion websites and other photo sites. If you relied purely on image search for your website traffic, it would now be reduced to nothing. If your website did not rely on image traffic, then you would not have noticed any change at all. You have to realize that it doesnt matter what you do, you will not get back that traffic you once got from google image search.

How to build back this image traffic was not in your question but I will answer anyway. I cannot tell you what you can do, but I can tell you what I did. I became extra active on Social Media like facebook, Pintrest and Tumblr. In these three websites, the pillars of viral content are photos. You can post your images here and link back to your content in the description. You want those images to get shared, repinned, reblogged respectively. How to do that, I will leave it for another day.

Another issue that seemed to arise was the copyrights of the images. As a previous digital forum member rightly said, it depends on the images. But I can assure you that the images that you use for your website are unlikely to be copyright protected. For example, if you took the iPhone, Apple will release pictures of the iPhone which you can happily reuse in your website. In fact they want you to reuse these images as it gives their product the much needed exposure. How to find these images? If you took any news website, the images that they use are usually publicity images released by the company. These images you can add your own watermark if you wanted to. In my celebrity images website I do this all the time. I find these images that the production house release to the press and then upload them to my website after renaming them first and adding my own alt tags. I also add my own watermark to every single image I post. It is in the best interest of the production house that I do this. Check out this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_still.

You also mentioned that if a website has their watermark on the image, you wont use it. This is a good idea. But I see an image in a top website like E! which has the E! watermark on it, but in another website I find the same image without the E! watermark. It is a nobrainer that I choose the one without the watermark to post in my website. You could do the same.

I hope this was helpful.

 

Well done Alrik. Great post.
Welcome to DP!

Nigel

 

Sorry I don't read all the conversation here, but as per your question :
is using the same images will affecting your SEO (because use the same images) ?

My answer is:
Regardless the images copyrighted or not, you can just rename the images filename and put it on your blog.
Google technology can not detect are they same image or not, but still detect filename base.

But if it is a copyrighted images, you should ask permission from website owner or the photographer..

 

https://www.google.com/imghp

Drag an image from your desktop and Google can read it and will tell you where else you can find that image. Try it. They have the technology.

 

But how to find if an image has been copyrighted or not?

 

Thanks for your correction and your info..
Just trying to edit colors and resize, they still find similar image..

 

If you are confused in finding the right owner of that image, you can always look at flicker, which is safe from copyrights. You can use those images either by providing a link nor you can contact the owner and purchase it.

 

Hi,
It depends upon how you choose the image. If some images are copyrighted and use their logos, company site names., then definitely you shouldn't use it. also you can check whether the image can be used more number of sites (https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi paste the image here which you want to copy) it will show the result who are all using the same image
SEO effects

1) If you are using others image on your site/blog when they have already positioned in SERP also they have proper image tags (ALT, title) then search engines will consider you have copied from other sites. the same for article submission too

2) If you can copy from another website that is reusable image means just do some alteration and use it. and you may give caption in the image with their site link in text format like (thanks: domain.com)


Regards,
Roger