Image only badges giving link juice!?!?

[SwissNinja]

I see some chatter about badges, but no clear definition. A collegue of mine instituted badges on clients website, but these badges are only an image w/ hyperlink; no textual content.

He is confident that this has worked successfully before as a link building strategy, which blew my mind. I thought we needed some text, and obviously optimizes anchor text for biggest benefit.

Are these simple badges helpful, or do we need some html in there!?

He also routes them through bit.ly to track impressions and clicks.. does that have any effect as well?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

An image can be a link and pass link juice.

A bit.ly URL is a form of redirect. You will lose some link juice by using bit.ly, the same as you would with any redirect.

[SwissNinja]

will an image use the 'alt text' in place of anchor text since there is none? Is an image link as valuable as text link? I figured I would see link building services offer badges and other image based products if these were that valuable.

thanks!

[RyanKent]

Alt images can use alt text. The ALT parameter is designed to identify contents of an image to those without the ability to see images such as the visually impaired.

Anchor text is the term given to text which can be clicked on to take a user to a given URL.

Frankly, most "link building" services are pure crap. In my experience the overwhelming majority of them offer no value whatsoever. Many do more harm then good.

[SwissNinja]

So in your link building efforts, you have seen image hyperlinks show up in a backlink report? I never have seen that. The presence of them in a backlink report indicates to me there is an SEO benefit (specifically reported in google webmaster tools backlinks)

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

You have seen image hyperlinks show up in a backlink report?

Yes, it is quite common. As an example, look at Google's link profile: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.google.com

The 4th/5th/6th links are from images.

[SwissNinja]

I can definitely see image in the open site explorer. I do the link: query in yahoo site explorer for google.com and download the1000 results they make available. all but 18 out of the 1,000 were labeled as either html, xml or pdf (format column). the other 18 were 'unknown' and are all from google domains (url column).

I have never personally seen image links count in wither google or yahoo webmaster tools. Have you?

Thanks, I really appreciate the  the conversation

[irvingw]

while it's true image links do pass PR it is thought that they pass less than text links. adding the alt tag adds contexts, like an anchor text.

create SEO friendly badges like this example and you can make your badge a text link instead!

http://www.onlinemedicaltourism.com/get-the-seal.html