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Flickr SEO in Action: Google Crawling Photo Tags and more
Social Media News Source: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
Story Found By: MattMcGee 1759 Days ago
Category: Social Media
Enough of the "tips" and "theory." Here’s a look at a Flickr photo ranking highly in Google and Yahoo for two different commercial terms (i.e., product name) and how it got there.

Sneak preview: It ranks #1 for a word in the photo’s TAGS.
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from qwerty 1759 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Interesting. It’s pretty clear that the one word that’s only in a tag indicates that the tag matters, although I suppose it’s possible that the relevance could be coming from a link with "bookshelf" in the anchor text. And of course, because the page lists the tags, the word is on the page, so it’s not necessarily that it’s the tag itself doing it. In fact, if you look at the snippet Google brings up on the search for [ladder bookshelf], you see the word twice: "Click this icon to see all public photos tagged with bookshelf bookshelf ..." -- probably due to the alt attribute in the globe image which anchors the same link as the word.

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from MattMcGee 1759 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Yes, that’s the alt attribute making the 2nd appearance of the word "bookshelf" -- and you’re right, qwerty, "bookshelf" might appear in some anchor text pointing at the page. What’s interesting (that I decided not to mention) is that anyone can add tags to a photo, just as anyone can add comments. Of course, the photo owner can delete tags & comments, so I’m not suggesting spam would work -- but it still presents an interesting overall look at a single photo page and the product-level opportunities. (At least I hope it does!) :)

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from BogglesMyMind 1759 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Interesting. I noticed that the actual Flickr page with the first cited image has 81 links to it, as recognized by Yahoo! Site Explorer. I would venture to say that has as much to do with the rankings as the tags.

Avatar Administrator
from MattMcGee 1759 Days ago #
Votes: 0

No doubt, Chris - the links power everything. But the word "bookshelf" only appears in one place on the page -- in the tags -- and it ranks #1 on Google and Yahoo for "ladder bookshelf."

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from qwerty 1759 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I’d be interested in seeing if at some point (I’m sure they don’t do this now) the search engines were able to find the meta data of an image itself, ignoring what’s on the page, or even the alt attribute and file name. I’m talking about using an app like MS Photo Info to add keywords (which I assume are the same as tags) to the file and seeing if they can pick that up. Of course, once that happens I expect we’ll see a lot of keyword stuffing in the meta data of image files.

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