Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
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.
So the days of parsing links onto high PageRank Flickr pages are over. Or are they? No. Let’s examine why in list form. Let’s examine how you can use the remaining scraps of link juice from Flickr in your SEO campaigns.
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.
2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.
3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.
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% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Social Media Optimization | 10 Comments »
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
I suppose I should preface this post by saying that spam is in the eye of the beholder. The people who add giant, bulky graphics as comments on Flickr.com certainly don’t view their contribution as spam, even if the graphic has no relevance to the picture. But these days, Flickr seems harder and harder to differentiate from MySpace. Take, for instance, this page:
A very attractive site
Some of the gargantuan comment graphics in that URL take up nearly half the page, but other Flickr users don’t seem to mind. In fact, they seem to be embracing it. This is good news for owners of these link-laundering websites from an SEO standpoint, provided that Flickr doesn’t add no-follow tags or disable external live links in comments altogether. They can seek out high PageRank Flickr pages and drop comments, and of course, the Flickr community builds their links for them. Indeed, Flickr is a link-launderers paradise.
But at what point will the users step back and say, “Where am I? MySpace or Flickr?”
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in Link Building, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization | 10 Comments »
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