Photo sharing site Flickr has recently started using nofollow tags in its individual photo descriptions, reports CNET and WebProNews. Should we care?

There are two ways to look at this. The first way is that nofollow links in the descriptions of individual photos might discourage certain search engine optimizers or webmasters from posting photos to Flickr. That may not be bad as those most discouraged are probably spammers and webmasters looking for cheap link juice. On the other hand, legitimate search engine optimizers and webmasters will suffer along with the spammers and may end up finding other ways to get free links.

The second way to look at this is that that Flickr is now in the practice of selling paid links. Here’s the gist of the change:

(WPN) The links in Set and Collection descriptions are still free of them, but the links embedded in individual photo descriptions have been nofollowed.

Since Flickr members are only allowed three Sets, that means free members will be limited in the number of links they can add and get link juice from. Only paid members who have more than three Sets will have an unlimited link juice at their disposal, which makes Flickr effectively a link seller. How will Google treat Flickr now that this policy has been implemented?

Personally, I don’t see much to worry about. Legitimate search engine optimizerss and webmasters will always find ways to get good links and spammers will always find ways to game the system. Many social sites are adding nofollow tags to prevent the spammers from gaming the system. I say keep posting your photos to Flickr and get a little creative in how seek inbound links. We do not want this to negatively affect search engine optimization as much as it could!

I like Matt Cutts. Sometimes.

Recently, he addressed an issue regarding Google Images and took the opportunity to explain, once again, how search engines work. I have a few thoughts of my own.

Recently I was on an email thread and the images team wanted to address a misconception. Google Images doesn’t have a dedicated blog right now, so I offered some space on my blog if someone wanted to do a guest post.

Perhaps Google Images needs its own blog now.

Every now and then a story surfaces that Google has ‘censored’ images or web pages and removed them from our site without saying a word to anyone.

I just want to say that I don’t work for Google and Google doesn’t give me money for supporting their cause. But this just doesn’t make sense in and of itself. Google has nothing to gain from censoring images. Ever. Why would they do this? You can Google porn and see all kinds of smut that is likely illegal where you live within seconds and probably see stuff you’ve never imagined possible. You can Google gruesome war photos. You can Google videos of Osama bin Laden making demands to the U.S. and other western countries. There is hardly anything at all that you can’t Google, yet somehow this person thinks that Google censors. Actually, it does - in China where, by law, it has to or risk being blocked by the Chinese government. If Google is so open about its censorship in China, why would it ever deny doing so anywhere else? The allegations just makes no sense.

Well it turns out this image was difficult to find on images.google.com for the first few days after the match, and the story that’s gathered steam is that Google removed it. Some outlets said that this was under pressure from the Israeli government.

First of all let’s put the story straight: we definitely didn’t do this. In fact from the very beginning you could find the image quite easily on YouTube and also on Google News.

It is particularly uncanny that people accuse Google of censorship when you can find the images they claim are being censored elsewhere on the Web. If Google were to censor an image, don’t you think it would censor the image for every result and not just one or two? If the image is on Google News and YouTube then you can Google it and find it. If you can Google it and find it then Google hasn’t censored it. If the image search doesn’t show your website as a result then the problem isn’t Google, it’s your website. Matt Cutts, however, has another simple reason why an image may not appear in Google search results for a few days:

The reason for the delay in the image showing up on Google Images was that it can take a few days between when an image appears and when its crawled by the Googlebot, as explained here.

I’m so tired of hearing the “Google is broke” sob stories. There is nothing wrong with Google. In some ways, the search engine is actually better than it used to be, as Matt clearly points out in his blog post:

When I joined Google in early 2000, we measured the time to update our index in months. Personally, I think it’s great that people now start to wonder why we don’t have a particular web page or image within just a few days. Over time, Google is getting fresher and fresher in my experience, but making a search engine work really well is a difficult task.

Did you read that? Months! It took Google months to index a document in 2000. Most of the time today you can have a document indexed in a few days or even a few hours. But the time factor for indexing new documents has a lot to do with the document and the source of it that is being crawled. If you own several websites and you know how to build incoming links to a website quickly so that you get the search engines to it to crawl the site then you can see quicker results. If you don’t then you may not see results for months. It all boils down to how savvy you are at search engine optimization. I’ve had blog posts on this blog indexed and hit No. 1 at Google within 4 hours. That’s because this blog is a trusted source for Google. We do things right.

That said, Google doesn’t crawl images. All the search engines are trying to figure out better ways to index images. Until they do, we’re stuck with alt tags, page authority, surrounding text, inbound links, anchor text, and other such clues. If the images on your website aren’t getting crawled, don’t blame Google. You probably need to improve your website’s crawlability.

Matt Cutts recently posted a video on Google’s Webmaster Central explaining the use of alt tags. I don’t think I need to rehash everything he covers because he explains it pretty well. But, in a nutshell, the alt tag describes the scene in a photo because search engines can’t scan photos. So this is a necessary element for image optimization. Here are some points for you when you are optimizing your images and photos:

• Use the alt tag - every time
• Be descriptive
• But don’t use too many words
• Make sure your alt tag includes your primary keyword
• Don’t stuff keywords into your alt tag
• Make sure you put the right alt tags with the right images

Alt tags are important for image optimization. Now, you can hear it from Matt Cutts:

Currently, photos and images are not crawlable. What that means is this: Search engines will never index images on the basis of the images alone. In order to get your photos indexed in the search engines you’ll have to include alt tags for them. An alt tag is a text equivalent of a photo that tells search engine crawlers what the photo is about. But what about duplicate photo content?

You know that if you have two websites with similar content then at least one of them will show up as duplicate content and you’ll get a penalty. Will that happen with photos as well?

Answer: It will if your alt tags are the same. Therefore, if you want to by pass the duplicate content penalty for photos and images, you’ll need to alter your alt tags for each image even if the images themselves are the same.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you have a photo of Knute Rockne after winning his last football game at Notre Dame. It is an action shot of the team hoisting Rockne high on their shoulders and carrying him off the field (I don’t know if that really happened). Rockne’s winning smile and his right hand holding a football high above his head makes the photo a great shot.

Now let’s say you put that photo on one website then publish it on another website two weeks later. Same exact photo, no modifications. On the first publication your alt tag reads “knute rockne wins.” On the second publication of that photo you make your alt tags “coach knute rockne on his last game at notre dame.” Chances are, these two photos will not appear as duplicate content in any of the search engines because the search engine crawlers are reading the alt text, not the photo images themselves.

On the other hand, let’s say that you have a photo of Knute Rockne’s first game at Notre Dame and publish that on the second website right next to the duplicate photo you published at Website 1. Now, give it the same alt tag that you gave Photo #1 on Site #1: “knute rockne wins.” Duplicate alt tag, but does that translate into duplicate content? I’m pretty sure it will because the search engines are looking at the alt tag and know that it describes a photo. Even though they can’t crawl each individual photo to determine whether they are the same or not, they make judgments based on your alt tags.

Here’s your lesson: Never use the same alt tag twice.