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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.
Comments:
Adrian Lee
02/22/2008 01:57 pm
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.
David Saunders
02/22/2008 02:00 pm
Ah well - I've been using Flickr for years and prefer Picasa It was always my preference to use Picasa Both are paid accounts - now I can dump Flickr and just use my favorite.... That is my last paid account with Yahoo! now that all the dom names are on Go Daddy David
Barry Schwartz
02/22/2008 02:27 pm
Personally, I love flickr and will continue to use it.
Scott M
02/23/2008 09:40 pm
This may be a temporary oversight on Flickr's part. But I am noticing that "no follow" is only implemented on the photo pages, not on the Set and Collection pages. My links on set & collection pages are not (yet?) "no follow". Maybe, just maybe, Flickr is allowing a small loophole here. Or not. Did I just ruin it??? :-)
Jacques Snyman
02/24/2008 07:05 pm
PageRank is overrated and becoming more and more redundant. The nofollow takes PageRank conferring weight away from links, but the link is still there.
semarketin
02/24/2008 07:19 pm
Some might argue that juice still flows through a 'no follow' link anyway. ;)