This may not be big news, but I wasn’t really aware of it, and I can imagine there are others who aren’t aware either.
In early 2008, Flickr began NOFOLLOWing hyperlinks in their photo profile pages.
What does that mean?
FYI, nofollowing is the means by which you stop SEO juice flowing out from one (your) site to another.1 In other words, it means Flickr are stopping SEO juice from flowing away from them.
On the other hand, many blogs embed Flickr images, and link back to it, thereby giving some of their juice to Flickr.
The bottom line is that Flickr has effectively become a sink for SEO juice. But they haven’t been one from the beginning. After getting everybody’s juice, the have changed the rules and stopped giving back any.
What you should know is: SEO juice is the currency on the web (alongside with respect). It’s an economic value, equivalent to real money. As with any economic value, it’s a “give and take” thing. To exchange economic values is trade. To give economic value, and not request anything in return, is a gift. To take economic value, and not give anything back in return, is robbery.
Flickr receives huge economic value in form of user contribution. The value they used to give back in return was that precious SEO juice. But all of a sudden, they changed their policy and stopped “paying back”. I don’t know about you, but I think that sucks. Badly!
So what to do about it?
For one, you can nofollow your own links to Flickr. If nothing more, then to re-establish “economical justice”. In case you don’t know, you can do that this way:2
- Open the image dialog for the image.
- Go to the “Advanced Setting” tab.
- Scroll down to “Advanced Link Settings”.
- In the field “Link Rel” enter “nofollow”.
Unfortunately, Flickr is not the only “last minute” policy switcher. Other famous non-commercial sites, Wikipedia and del.icio.us, have done similarly before. And not surprisingly, many (most?) commercial sites are routinely nofollowing thier outgoing links.
So you can also go one step further, and use the NoFollow Reciprocity plugin.3 (Note that the WordPres plugin page says it is compatible up to 2.6.1, but AFAICT it works with my 2.7.1 version flawlessly.)
The plugin will automatically nofollow links to sites you select, and comes with an already preset list of 1000 (!) “unfair” sites that nofollow their links.4 Unfortunately, that list is hard-coded, so you’ll have to change the plugin code if you want to add or remove sites, but the place in the code is quickly spotted (it starts at line 80 in version 2.1 of the plugin), and easily changed, too.
- There is an excellent introductory article about the origins of “nofollow” at inverudio.com. [↩]
- Actually, I wonder why the Insights plugin that I’m using is not providing an option to automatically nofollow image links, especially as the author claims to be a SEO expert. [↩]
- The NoFollow Reciprocity homepage gives some excellent insights about SEO juice distribution, and how “nofollow” has brought an unbalance into the SEO game. [↩]
- Of course, you can abuse the plugin to nofollow links to fair sites, too, but that’s up to your conscience.
[↩]
January 9th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
It may sound good to Flickr and Wikipedia to add nofollow to their links but if all of the large sites do this then what happens to SEO? Do we go back to keyword density and other basic ranking techniques? Will we be forced to purchase any links that we need SEO juice from? I’ve contributed a LOT to Flickr and I think this is rotten. Thanks for helping get the word out on this.
January 9th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Mark, the situation is even more ridiculous today actually than it was back then. Meanwhile Google changed their nofollow policy and Flickr & Co. do not gain the slightest SEO advantage from nofollowing links on their sites. They could as well dofollow them again. The status quo is just plain dumb… and understandably, very disturbing to contributors like you.
On the other hand, AFAICT modern SEO is unthinkable without link building, it’s just becoming harder every day to get high value links for free.
January 12th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
that the biggest problem:you look for high rank value links instead of writing unique information.Google has no smart algorithm whatever she says she has.
March 4th, 2010 at 12:32 am
Hackadelic, thanks for this news. I have spent time on Flickr building optimized sets thinking it might do my site good… go figure.
March 4th, 2010 at 9:19 am
Charlotte, welcome. FYI, you still get the human traffic from the flickr pages, but the page rank those pages have doesn’t contribute to your website.
April 14th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
I for one have noticed that my Flickr photos do add another search result for my companies website. In a field as niche as mine having a few search results for my company is a big plus in my opinion. Or am I just ignorant?
JPF~
April 15th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
James, right, images (and videos) are known to have that effect. But it does not affect your pagerank, while a dofollowed link from Flickr would.
April 16th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
While a nofollowed link doesn’t give pagerank does it affect your actual ranking in google?
April 17th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Massy, it should be obvious that the answer is “No”. (No page rank given => no change in ranking.)
May 14th, 2010 at 12:18 am
Massy, I think there’s more to be said than a strict “no” for your question.
Hackadelic, you know that Pagerank is not the only rankings factor. It’s clear as soon as you see that a PR3 site ranking above a PR4 that there are other rankings factors than simply Pagerank.
Whether Nofollow links are included in any of these “other” rankings factors is up in the air. Google has neither confirmed nor denied that a simple citation (just having your URL listed on another page, not necessarily DoFollow and not necessarily even a link) influences rankings.
I think it’s safe to say that the existence of links from nofollow sites, including Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Facebook will have an effect on rankings in the future (that is, if they do not currently have such an effect).
May 20th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
May I toss in a suggestion? In addition to no-following links to Flickr, no-follow all links to yahoo.com, and any other domain owned by Yahoo.
After all, Flickr is nothing more than one of the masks that Yahoo wears these days.
May 26th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Tony, the “ranking” you talk about is keyword ranking, i.e. actual position in search results for a specific keyword. Of course it’s not the only factor, there are many on-page factors that influence this. But according to Google – and they did confirm this – page rank does not flow through a nofollowed link. Hence, all other things being equal, nofollowed links are worthless in terms of PR.
I wonder why you say “it’s safe to say that the existence of links from nofollow sites [...] will have an effect on rankings in the future”, while one paragraph before you wrote that the influence of nofollowed links is “up in the air” and unconfirmed by Google. Unless you have some evidence, this sounds like wild speculation to me.
The opposite is true: It is safe to say that nofollowed links DO NOT pass page rank. First and foremost, because Google have invented nofollow, and they gave it its semantics, too (to not pass PR).
May 26th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
N.F.S., IMO the “nofollow reciprocity” plugin nofollows all these and more already.