I have an eCommerce store and take many photos related to my niche. (Birds Parrots etc…)
I decided to share photos I had taken for my website showing specific birds on eggs nesting. I uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons and referenced the source to my site.
It seems that Y and G have indexed the links and added link juice to my site which is cool however, I was posting the images under the GNU license for educational purposes and not intending it as a SEO tactic.
Is this something that will stick for long term SEO to my site? I know the links are Nofollow but is there any credibility to these links passing authority?
Well there’s not really such a thing as a bad backlink, so although these links might be nofollowed they will still be part of your overall link profile and might contribute value in some way. Maybe people using the images will link to you separately to attribute the image source, and you might end up with some followed links.
I completely understand how the nofollow is not supposed to pass PR, however the dramatic change in my SE results as a result of the author credit pointing to my site seems to have funny timing.
I am heavily involved in many other off page SEO tactics so maybe this is the reason. I have been using linkvana, Build My Rank, The link Juicer, Forum Sponsorships, and guest blogging on very high PR sites.
microjoes, search engines don’t take licenses into account (at least not in respect to how the work ranks), remember that search engines are robots that simply look for content and index it, nothing more (their not humans - they can’t tell what means what). In regards to “link juice”, don’t give it any second thoughts, the very nature that the link within the content is nofollow means that you won’t get any link juice (the only benefit you’ll see are people clicking the link - not Google using it to give you authority or an increased ranking). It’s a simple fact that nofollow links aren’t accounted for by Google or Yahoo, the nofollow directive explicitly tells search engines not to give the link any value in rankings. Basically, if the link is nofollow, there’s no SEO ranking boost to be gained from it.
