Flickr is NOT useless for SEO
Many were enraged last week when Flickr added nofollow tags to comments and picture captions. Why people would be enraged is beyond me because even my dead pet octopus could have predicted that Flickr’s sad fate was rapidly approaching. And the more that SEO’s kept blogging about how great Flickr was as an SEO tool, the faster the digits on the time bomb moved.
1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.
Many Flickr personal profile and group pages gain toolbar PR just by having the link spread around in-house, so it’s not that hard to make those pages accumulate PR. Google seems to be very generous in that regard. There’s a lot of PR to be passed around through Flickr apparently.
So, the glory days of Flickr SEO may be over (unless Yahoo does the improbable and flips the switch back), but Rome didn’t burn to rubble in a day, so we might as well make the most of Flickr before it completely collapses.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Want to know what Shell is doing?
10 Responses to “Flickr is NOT useless for SEO”
By Referate on Feb 28, 2008 | Reply
That was the logical thing to do when you consider the spam was on that site. I am pretty sure they will add no follow everywhere.
Who’s next to add nofollow?
By luukmuu on Feb 29, 2008 | Reply
A very useful tip for Flickr. Thhank you for sharing. And I have subscribed to your blog….cheers
By RennyBA on Mar 2, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and knowledge. I’ve used Flickr for a long time and often wondered about this.
I also make a link in the description of my pictures to the referring post and that gives a bit of traffic to my blog too.
Since new here: Hello from Norway - wishing you a lovely Sunday and a great week ahead.
Btw: I’ve voted for you at Bloggers Choice Awards.
By SEO Australia on Mar 9, 2008 | Reply
Ah..thanks for sharing. I didn’t know that those group pages are do-follow. But honestly it doesn’t matter to me ..that much.
This whole PR game is over long time back.
By Avocat on Mar 11, 2008 | Reply
#SeoAustralia: I am not sure what you mean with PR doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe you are missing the picture here.
Those links are not about PR as you understand Google Page Rank..are about a trusted link from a very trusted site, passing some if not a lot of “link juice”, where you can use your desired anchor text. That is a great link for everyone.
By Jonathan Praklis on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
I just attended Search Engine Strategies 2008 in NYC and this was mentioned. I just checked out Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/elementalsilver/), however, and cannot see nofollow used in any of the link tags. Am I missing something? Was this rescinded?
By Jonathan Praklis on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Okay, so a photo detail page (i.e.: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elementalsilver/2347016899/) does contain the nofollow attribute for external links, but it doesn’t on the photo index page. So, wouldn’t this mean you can still get some page rank value if your photo index pages gained some PR? Maybe not all is lost?
By Shell Harris on Mar 21, 2008 | Reply
Jonathan, - I was at the SES New York conference too. I think you are referring to the comments by Jen Laycock. I still think Flickr provides link popularity in some cases and now I believe even more that posting your own images will help with Universal Search and Image search in all the search engines.
What was your impression of the conference?
By Mark on Mar 24, 2008 | Reply
Like any other free resource abused, Flickr will lose its value very soon. It is just a normal situation and Flickr makes no exception from this rule.
By Will on Mar 28, 2008 | Reply
@Jonathan: I just checked the cached text version of the photo index page you mentioned and the links aren’t showing up.