How do Infographics provide links? (example inside)

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

I don't get it...
I've encountered the following infographic that seemed to do well: http://www.brilliance.com/4cs-of-diamonds-infograph

As you can see, the page has thousands of social shares from Tweets to Facebook and obviously Pinterest. However, when I placed this page on Open Site Explorer (click to view) I see only 9 external links and page authority of 28/100. And this seems to me like a successful infographic.

Any explanations?

Thanks

[matbennett]

If you put the URL of that image in to Google's search by image you get this list of results of where else that has been us3ed http://goo.gl/mkAdJW

If you go down that list you will find that the majority of those sites then link back to the originating site by way of a credit.  Voila - links!

So the process there was most likely to produce a list of sites that might use the infographic and contact them all to offer it (requesting a link by way of credit).  It's an effective method in terms of the number of links that can be generated from it, but it doesn't create the best overall link profile.  A lot of the links can be from pages that drop off quickly or from sites that link out to almost anything.  It also creates a very definite pattern.  Not to be overdone, but it does still seem to work.

[BeytzNet]

What about Pinterest? Does it generate links? I would have expected to see 1000 links from Pinterest alone...

[matbennett]

Why not check for yourself?  Same logic.  Put image URL in to image search, but this time add site:pinterest.com to the end.

http://goo.gl/OGgeb8

Not thousands, but there are some.  You can now check the source of those page to see whether there are followed links or not.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Not all infographics that are made are for links, that one in particular was a sales tool but it still drives nice links , shares , and traffic.

In terms of links, alot get linked to the home page as the source and some to the image url.

[BeytzNet]

What do you mean by "In terms of links, alot get linked to the home page as the source and some to the image url."

Do you mean that due to an infographic on an internal page other sites often link to the homepage of the infographic owner?

Also, as I mentioned I was surprised, as you can see from the amount of the social shares this infographic did had ncie buzz (maybe still does). However the amount of links I could locate is ok nothing more and also the PA by MOZ OSE is only 28... Looks weird to me. Makes me wonder...

[KaneJamison]

Seems like a nice enough graphic to me. Perhaps the target audience is inclined to share socially and not necessary link. That's very normal.

9 linking root domains is decent and there are probably lower quality ones not being displayed by Open Site Explorer.

Pinterest would generate links but you usually won't see this flooding the results in Open Site Explorer, probably due to crawl depth of OSE and similar factors - most of the shares just aren't important enough to index.