Hosting All Content Images On Flickr For Blog - What are SEO implications?

[DigitalLeaf]

Hi,

I am starting a travel blog and thought of the idea of hosting all the content images over at Flickr and just calling them into my blog content when needed.

Benefits:

• push traffic over to my Flickr account
• pull traffic from Flickr to my blog

However, I was just wondering about any SEO implications of having 3-4 links per post pointing to Flickr. Is this spammy? Will I lose my juice?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

Hi Chris.

Hosting images on Flickr is fine. It certainly is not spammy.

Based on your description, it seems you are linking to single images each time so you can still use the ALT tag. In my experience Flickr renames images to an unfriendly name. I am not sure if we have any Flickr pros who can advise you on a means to keep the uploaded file name. If not, you do lose the SEO benefit of a cleanly named file.

[AndyKuiper]

Having the images on your site's pages is better SEO wise. The algo takes into consideration 'engagement objects' such as photos, video, etc. in a positive way. The same goes for videos. If bandwidth is an issue, I'd suggest handling it in ways that will still allow you to keep your photos on the site.

Andy

[RyanKent]

Hi Andy.

That is interesting to hear. I would love to learn more about this topic. Do you have any links to discussions on this subject?

[DigitalLeaf]

Hi Andy,

I do intend to have the images on my site - just hosted over at Flickr.

This will allow me to add another level of engagement (over at Flickr) and Ill be able to link back to my site (and aim for a strong social signal for my domain).

Thoughts?

[AndyKuiper]

In my opinion, and it's just an opinion - clearly not gospel ;-), hosting images on the site is better. You may also post the images on sites like Flickr for the traffic. Flickr links do not pass link equity and you will lose link equity by having the external links on your page/s. The Flickr domain may be strong, but the page/s you host your photos on may not be strong (re: social signals). However I would agree with having photos (tagged) on as many good sites as possible for traffic, links & signals. In the past Rand has suggested hosting images on Flickr... not sure what he thinks nowadays.

Ryan; there are some who believe in hosting images off-site, and some who favour hosting images on-site. There's a lot of discussion around the topic; I haven't seen anything definitive one way or the other.

[RyanKent]

Thanks for the clarification Andy.