Collin of Mixed Market Arts has put together another great post on link building. He shows us how when can use Flickr to get linkbacks and drive traffic to our site.
What is Flickr?
Everyone knows about Flickr and that it is the largest photo sharing site and that it serves millions of users every month. However, as Collin points out, most are not aware that you can leave links, using HTML, in the photo comments. This allows the search engines to follow the links and pass PageRank as well as users to follow the link bringing you traffic.
Why should I build links with Flickr?
This is a good question with a really obvious answer.
Flickr is a massive site and is growing at a rapid rate. Flickr is already a Google Pagerank 9 site, which means it is looked highly upon by the search engines. There are over 73,000,000 pages cached by Google on the site already. In other words, there are over 50,000,000 opportunities to get your blog noticed!
How to build links with Flickr
I am just going to summarize Collin’s points as I could not say it any better.
Extremely Unethical Method
Browse around everywhere spamming comments with your link in them. The comments provide little value and are simply “copy/pasted” material with your HTML link embedded in it.
Unethical Method
You make a lot of comments on random pictures you take little interest in. The comments you make are masked to sound like you truly care about the person when you couldn’t seriously give a damn. An example would be “Nice picture, do you mind if I use it over at my blog that shows you how to make money blogging?”
Ethical Method
Nearly the same as above, but you would only comment on the pictures that you would actually use in a blog post. I know a lot of bloggers that have a picture at the top of every blog post, and the majority of them find those pictures off Flickr.
To wrap it up
Collin leaves a final tip to maimize the effectiveness of your link building. He recommends looking for popular photos on Digg. These photos will have higher PageRank and you may be able to get some of the traffic if the photo is still on the “recently popular in the last 30 days” section. This adds up to more value and traffic for your links.
February 1st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
That’s an excellent idea to get some more backlinks. Never thought about using Flickr to get some pr juice. Thanks for the tip.