Creative Commons Images Good for SEO?
-
I've been looking at large image packages through iStock, Getty, Fotolia and 123RF, but before spending a bunch of money, I wanted to get some of your feedback on Creative Commons images.
Should be worried that something found on Google Images > Search Tools > Usage Rights section can be used without issue or legal threats from the big image companies so long as they are appropriately referenced?
AND will using these types of images and linking to the sources have any affect on SEO efforts or make the blog/website look spammy in Google's eyes because we need to link to the source?
How are you using Creative Commons images and is there anything I should be aware of in the process of searching, saving, using, referencing, etc?
Patrick
-
Hey Federico! Thanks for your note about the images linking from a site to the author's site with a NoFollow link. We thought that was the answer, but wanted to get confirmation and appreciate you reassuring our gut feeling.
I may have not been too clear in my question, but we aren't trying to rank images for SEO as we know the original authors will get top priority (hopefully).
Per the stock photo accounts, we have spoken with the copyright teams from iStock/Getty and 123RF and they are of the same nature. If we, the company, buy images on behalf of our clients, then we are not allowed to send the client the raw file or a copy of the raw file, as that would break their copyright rules. However, we can use that said image for any number of websites or blogs as we choose since we have the royalty free rights to that file. It really is such a grey area, but when we talk with clients we inform them that if they want any images for the website/blog and wish to use those same images for any print material (brochures, magazine ads, flyers, etc) then we ask them to open an account with the respective site and purchase the images, so they hold the rights. We then upload the images and then delete from our systems. It's too much of a hassle.
I will review the link you shared for the FlickR CC images. Thanks for sharing that! - Patrick
-
It won't make your site look spammy if the content you are publishing isn't spam. CC images require you to link back to the original source, you can even use a nofollow attribute on those links.
But still, as the images are not yours, you won't benefit from image search, as Google will list the original image posted by the author instead of yours.
There are royalty free stock photos that you can use and they aren't that expensive if you are on a subscription. Like Fotolia offers a subscription for 5 images at $25 per mo. But you can download a lower resolution one, which will deduct half a credit and then you can download 10 images. Most likely, you don't need the one that's worth 1 entire credit as the 1/2 credit one is large enough.
PS: Here's a post from Ann Smarty about how to use CC images from flickr: http://www.seosmarty.com/flickr-creative-commons/
Hope that helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Technical SEO
Hi Team, What are the points we are missing on our website from technical SEO front? http://www.giftxoxo.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Reviews and Other Content in Tabs and SEO
Hello, We are redesigning our product page and have considered putting our customer reviews in a 'tab' on the page, so it is not visible to the user until they click on the tab. Are there any SEO implications of this? Right now, we do have problems with this because we use a third party tool for our reviews and they are in javascript, so they do not get crawled, but going forward we will be using our native platform. We want the text of the reviews to get crawled and indexed. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colbys0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
Real Estate Local SEO
My site hovers on page 2 of google for the key search phrase. I have a blog that gets updated often, I have genuine links coming in, I promote on all social media channels, I do email campaigns, I have a site map, I have my local address on what I believe are the most important sites like Yelp, Manta, Google Local etc. All this and my site is still on page 2 while other sites with less of everything are on page 1. What is missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Headline tag for images in Photoshelter
Hello! I use Photoshelter for my commercial photography website: http://www.ioansaidphotography.co.uk/ I'm trying to make it better re SEO and all that by filling as much information as I can. I'm using Picworkflow who give you a title, description and keywords for every picture.. But in Photoshelter's IPTC metadata editor, they put an SEO tag by Headline (essentially saying it's important) and not by title. Do you think it's good/useful/safe to use the info Picworkflow gave me for title and put it in Headline? PS: This is for the pictures individually and not the pages. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0 -
What does this technique achieve? Is it bad or good?
There is a technique that makes a category results page never change its links: www.example.com/category/apartments
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elwebmaster
www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment1
www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment2
www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment3
www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment4 Instead of the classic: www.example.com/category/apartments
www.example.com/details/apartment/id/789
www.example.com/details/apartment/id/788
www.example.com/details/apartment/id/787
www.example.com/details/apartment/id/786 Basically: The URL www.example.com/category/apartments-apartment1 today will have one apartment, and tomorrow will have another, on the same link. The category page never changes links, it always has the same 10 links, that look the same as the category url and are numbered from 1 to 10.0 -
Do 404 Errors hurt SEO ?
I recently did a crawl test and it listed over 10,000 pages, but around 282 of them generated 404 errors (bad links) I'm wondering how much this hurts overall SEO and if its something I should focus on fixing asap ? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RagingBull0 -
The SEO process...step by step
In what order do you carry out your SEO? do you start with keyword research or competitor analysis or is it on-page and then on to link building, do you concentrate on article submissions and then move on to social networking? List your step by step process here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IPIM0