The Evils of Flickr
TheSpot-er on April 14th, 2008
NOTE! If you enjoy this post, please feel free to
twitter it with the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/59jx7q and comment below. Thanks, I appreciate it and value your feedback! Alex Sysoef
Flickr Is Evil to Your Blog!
There, I said it and now I will jump into actual explanations and you can choose to either agree or disagree with me but either way I would appreciate your personal opinion. And perhaps the most important point of the post is that Flickr does you no favors when it comes to your WordPress blog Search Engine Optimization.
And obviously to prove my theory I have to paint some grim pictures, exaggerate, etc … or Do I?
Perhaps I better go with known facts and see if I can prove something this way…
Shared Hosting Constrains
Majority of the blogs are located on shared hosting. This is a known fact as well as all the limitations it imposes. Anyone who has a blog on shared host is aware that OFFLOADING media helps your blog, because it removes the bandwidth constrains.
And while absolutely true in some cases such as bandwidth intensive multimedia: video, audio; I think it should NEVER be applied to images.
Properly optimized images don’t take much room on your server and your bandwidth but they do help you get traffic from search engines! Here is an image of the stats for one of my small sites:
Keep in mind that Visitors From Google Image Search are nearly 10% of regular visitors from Google.
And that is fairly small site that has a few images hosted locally. But each image is optimized for searhc using simple following steps:
- Use English for image name with Keywords included. Simply means if image is a photo of a dog, don’t name it image001.jpg but be descriptive and make sure to include keywords in it. For example: cute_dog.jpg and if it is a picture of specific breed be even more creative and make sure to state it. Image name IS important in the eyes of Search Engines
- Use ALT Descriptions for Images. It is optional but it is helpful to search engines since they can’t see the image but only read what info you provide. Help them send you more traffic!
- Optimize Your Images. It is very important that you don’t just load image in whatever format you have it. Sometimes using optimization can reduce size down to 10% of original while still retaining quality that is visually good.
- Size your Images to Content. This one is too often overlooked by bloggers and I really don’t know why… Your blog’s main content area has a defined size (for a static theme) or a fluid, in which case you need to know what is the lowest size (screen resolution) retains usability. Optimize your image size to fit into those pre-defined areas. For example, I know this blog’s main content area presents me with a maximum width of 500 and I size all my images to fit with width=450.
- Host your images locally! Now this one is a big one… When Google finds a relevant image on your blog and presents it to people who search for it - where do you want those people to go? Your Blog Or Flickr?
While flickr provides you with some nice options to add interactivity to your blog - It Is Evil!
Images don’t take too much space on your shared hosted blog and they don’t take too much bandwidth but they CAN and WILL help you get some additional visitors if implemented properly.
A few simple steps I have outlined above not only will make your images most beneficial to your blog but also will ensure that Search Engines love them and will reward you with some free traffic!
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Interesting… I use pixamo.com to host my blog photos. I don’t think anything comes up in Google searches- at least from what I have tested. And there is no bandwidth limits at pixamo.
Christine …
It is not about the bandwidth limits but about where is image located. When Google finds it and identifies its name, description, etc and as result presents in relevant SERP’s - where will it send the traffic?
Your blog or pixamo?
That was one of the main points of the post
You choose where that traffic will go, as you can see in stats image I provided for one of my very small niche site - it is actually almost double of the traffic from yahoo.
Alex
But if the flickr page points back to your blog post in the description, its not quite so bad.
You’re still ’splitting the votes’ though.
Lea’s last blog post..Nofollow Followon
Lea,
I don’t use flickr or any other hosted method for pictures but I would be interested to learn from someone who does:
1. How much traffic they get from Google image search (if any)
2. How much traffic they get from Flickr, from the link….
I only speak what I know and 2 things above I don’t know and don’t care to test on any of my sited but would appreciate the info from someone who is using it that way. It might be an eye opener for me and many others …. or might not.
Ooops Alex,
I have only been using Flickr stuff in my own blogs as well as on the few posts I wrote here so far. As for traffic, I hardly ever get any for my images and I did tag them as far as I know.
The reason I used Flickr is because it is easy and free to do so. Plus having images in posts that are related helps to convey the message I believe. Let me know if you are totally against it, as I’ll drop them for you.
Monika Mundell’s last blog post..A Few Hickups
Hey Alex!
I haven’t run any stats on it. My other half is a pro photographer, and he has a high degree of interconnectedness between his flickr account and his photography sites. When I eyeball the logs I see lots of traffic between the two, but I haven’t looked at the stats for the origins of image traffic.
:looks:
Flickr offers stats on pro accounts, and, having had a peek he isn’t getting much from goog images - but he is getting 30 times as much from yahoo images. Thats a surprise! (but should it be? Yahoo owns Flickr, so it has intimate knowledge of what pictures are available…)
Both figures are more than he is getting straight to the site itself.
It would take some intensive numbercrunching to decide if the vote splitting was mattering, or if the flickr domain being way more high value simply overrides the website and provides more value, but I am inclined to suggest that I would expect that the more powerful flickr domain *with description pointing to the main site* provides more benefit than is lost by having the image hosted externally.
(Of course, you could have it both ways ;))
@ Lea, good point
I guess it depends on the personal preferences. I could be completely wrong - but still stick to what I know based on my experience BUT without ignoring the flickr all together… which brings me to next reply
@Monika - no, please do continue to use them :D. I would hate to loose interactivity on your posts but removing images and knowing how you work - it would be unrealistic for me to request to do it the way I do.
I’ll compensate for the few images you post with those that I add
hopefully the combination of two will even out.
Thanks Alex, good to know and I appreciate this.
Monika Mundell’s last blog post..A Few Hickups
No problem Monika!
hi Monika,
interesting point of view; not really used Flickr much yet butwill to keep your comments in mind when I do.
Zo’s last blog post..Does an auto submitter work?
@ Zo: thanks for your comment. Flickr has worked for me ever since I use them. I do however accept that not everybody will think the same, so it’s ok to use other services too. I know that many marketers use a paid service where they pay $1/post. While this doesn’t seem like much, it surely adds up, especially if you write as many blog posts as I do, LOL.
Monika Mundell’s last blog post..Freelance Writing Blog Crawl - Round Three
I have a very photo heavy blog. I post a daily travel photo from my trips around the world and I’ve won awards for my photography. (visit my site to see)
Until now I’ve hosted everything on Flickr.
Then I noticed how much traffic other blogs similar to mine were getting from Google Image search. I am basically getting zero traffic from Google Image search. I have more RSS subscribers, same or similar PR, I post more frequently, I optimize my “alt” and “title” tags for search. The big difference is that they host images on their server and I host on Flickr.
I began doing searching for common phrases like “statue of liberty” or other famous things. Flickr images are nowhere to be found.
I’ve had a few of my images hosted on other sites for interviews I’ve done. Those images rank higher than the ones I have on Flickr….and they’re my images!!
I think more research needs to be done, but based on my investigation, Flickr is death to image searching. I’ve found nothing to contradict this. You can find Flickr images if you have a very narrow search, but even then, I think they have a penalty applied to it.
I have over 3,600 images on Flickr. I have over 200 contacts. In the last 30 days, Flickr was only my #16 referring site sending me 71 visits (a little more than 2 per day).
I’m going to install the open source Gallery photo management platform and run a script to import everything from Flickr.
I’ll keep my Flickr account so I can submit to groups and do social networking things, but for my primary image hosting, I’m moving everything in house.
Gary’s last blog post..Disaster Averted
One other bit of data.
As a pro user, I went and checked my stats on Flickr.
My lifetime referrals from Google (to my Flickr account) 2,999
My lifetime referrals from Yahoo (to my Flickr account ) 2,160
I think Google’s share of the search engine market is like 6x that of Yahoo.
If Yahoo and Google are providing similar levels of traffic, and there are many times more searches being performed on Google, then something is clearly wrong. (it might be Yahoo giving preference to Flickr, but I think there is evidence in the other direction as well).
Gary’s last blog post..Disaster Averted
@ Gary: thanks for this great and valuable feedback. So do I understand you correctly by thinking you are going to just host the images yourself?
What about bloggers like me who don’t have a range of applicable images? Do you propose to upload them to our server instead (from Google image search) and then just credit the image to the person who owns it, or am I getting this totally mixed up?
Monika Mundell’s last blog post..Finding Work - Freelance Writing Guide
Like Zo, I hadn’t used Flickr yet, but thanks for pointing out what is an entirely logical supposition(?). ADG
Hi Alex,
I use Flickr images on one of my sites, but I host them myself (ie I download them from Flickr and upload them to my server). I wasn’t thinking of search when I decided this, I just preferred the control of using my own server… I’ll have to conctrate more on the search aspect. Thanks!
Stephen Cronins last blog post..Change To Google Search With Quotes