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A lot of my readers have been giving me excellent feedback stating that they love my link building strategies that I give away in the link building cookbook. Link building is important because nearly every blog wants additional search engine traffic, and building links is the best way to get it. I thought I would feed everyone’s link building appetite by releasing yet another tip that you won’t see anyone else telling you.
Introduction to Flickr
Flickr is a free image hosting site that is now owned by Yahoo. It stores thousands of images and serves millions of visitors every month. Flickr allows users to make comments on the pictures that are uploaded by other users.
What few people realize however, is that Flickr allows you to post links inside the comments that are auto-approved, followed by the search engines, and even pass pagerank/authority. Flickr also allows you to use some HTML to pick your favorite anchor text that you are looking to rank for in the search engines.
Why should I build links with Flickr?
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 can I build links with Flickr?
There are a few ways to do this. I will provide you with a few different options because I know that a lot of my readers prefer the ethical link building, while others prefer the “evil methods” that receive the maximum results.
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. You do not care if the person who uploaded the image removes your comment because you are simply going for quantity over quality.
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?”
This would get a few people who would delete it as spam. The remaining people would think you are serious and reply back thanking you and giving you permission (or not) to use their work. You would then never bother using their pictures on your blog, but are just keeping the link from the Flickr page.
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. You could meet a lot of photographers and have permission to build those links, although there would certainly be fewer of them. You would get full permission to use their pictures on your blog as well, avoiding any copyright problems.
Recommended Tip
If you are a frequent Digg user, you should have noticed that a lot of the images that get popular and hit the homepage are from Flickr. This is because Digg users know that Flickr is owned by Yahoo and is on some huge high bandwidth servers. You can use this to your example and find the Flickr images that were made popular on Digg. This will result in you getting a Flickr link (good in itself), combined with a lot of strong links that will make that Flickr page have a high pagerank. Depending on how fast you are at getting these comments posted, you may even see a huge spike of traffic flock over to your blog.
Proof of Concept
I recently saw a photo from Flickr hit the frontpage of Digg (1500+ diggs so far) and thought I would use this as my case study. The Digg article is called “Frontpage with 19 Diggs?” The link to the Flickr photo is here.
By doing a quick backlink search on Yahoo, we can see that the Flickr page is fully cached/indexed and is one of the strongest links to the Digg page, excluding Digg linking to itself. A screenshot is posted below:
The next time Google updates their pagerank system, I am sure this Flickr page will have a decent pagerank from that Digg frontpage alone. Since it hit the frontpage about 6 days ago, your links might even receive traffic for the next three weeks while the Digg post is still ranking in the “recently popular in the last 30 days” section.
As a reminder, there are many more Flickr photos that are popular on Digg, and I recommend that you do the research yourself instead of commenting on the proof of concept I listed above. The reason behind this is that there are over three hundred people who will also be wanting to post their link, so it will definitely stand out if we all build links on the same page. There are over 50 million potential links, I am positive we can all find enough for ourselves!
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This is sort of spam bot will normally did..to my blog,However i did sometimes comment and leave my link there.
beside i did this after second month blogging. at Youtube,metacafe,deviantart,flickr and others site that received tons of traffic
I always did this and still now.
Splendid idea! You always give great tips that no one else would tell.
I am one of those who uses photos at the top of nearly every post. I have used a few pictures from flickr, but your post gives me good reason to go back and step it up a notch.
I would never have stumbled on this with out reading Bloggingzoom.
So thank you for submitting your article.
Nick
Could you give a exmaple link to a page on flickr with outgoing links.
Thanks Ed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/1.....216395579/
Great idea. I’ve only just started using flickr - but I hadn’t really thought about it’s link building potentia;.
I guess I’ll test it out. If it doesn’t work, write a post about it… Hehe
Oh man, this is sick! Thanks for sharing!
I wonder how long it will be before Flikr goes nofollow though? Guess we’d better hurry up.
Don
[...] 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 [...]
I love this technique, Thanks Colin. Been using it today, it looks like you have as well.
I’ll try this with one of my blogs. One thing is thinking about is, whether the pages our comments are on will be visible for google.
[...] Link Building with Flickr from MixedMarketArts [...]
Not bad advice at all. Just make sure you don’t get banned from Flickr.
wow thanks for sharing this. I’m going to use this tip
[...] Part 21 - Link Building with Flickr [...]
I have been to flicker but dont see it as a money generating site for me although im into photography. Maybe im just into using other site same as flicker who is more commercial.
It looks as though Flickr are now using nofollow on all comments. Is there anyway round this.
[...] series of posts that covers the gamut of link building tricks. I particularly like using his link building with Flickr idea and have even figured out a way to find photos with good PR to get links from which I may [...]
[...] it seems to be perfected, so I thought I’d share it. It is based on Collin Lahay’s Link Building With Flickr technique and this one takes the process just on step further getting you links on pages with a [...]
this article is great, it gives me a new technique in link building. gonna try this stuff. thanks anyway.
another great link building technique… but does it really pass on pagerank? because isn’t it no-follow?