Yahoo's Flickr Slaps on NoFollows on Photo Owner's Links
As expected, Yahoo's Flickr has finally added the nofollow attribute on links generated by the owner of the photo. We have covered how you can use Flickr in your SEO and traffic building strategy but some of that has been taken away now.
Don't get me wrong, you can still generate a lot of traffic from Flickr. Flickr images tend to rank surprisingly well in Google and other search engines. So if you have an attractive link to your content, from that image, you can still get nice traffic. But the links themselves should not count anymore in terms of any search engine popularity.
By Yahoo adding the nofollow attribute to those links, most search engines will not count the link as credit towards your site's popularity score. So all that is now out the window. This does not come to a shock to many of us because this has been the pattern of all popular user generated sites. What is next?
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
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rustybrick in Link Building at February 22, 2008 7:49 AM
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UGC seems to be an area where the idea of link pop/PR falls down. Because it's not Flickr adding content, you can't make the assumption that a link from Flickr.com counts as a 'vote'.
It's basically the same as comments on a blog.
Adding rel=nofollow is obviously a way to do that, but it feels like accounting for something the search engines should work out...
You can't assume that the content on any site was written by the site owner any more.
Posted by Adrian Lee at February 22, 2008 08:57