Flickr Begins To Nofollow Outgoing Links
Posted: February 25th, 2008
After a nice little run by black-hat and grey-hat SEOs, Yahoo’s free photo hosting website Flickr has begun to take a stand. In the past week, Flickr has started to apply the nofollow attribute to comments on photos and even to links from photo descriptions.
Prior to this change, blackhats and greyhats had two main ways to steal link juice from Flickr: photo captions and; comments. The former wasn’t too big of a problem, but the latter was prone to abuse because it was so easy. Flickr users would often neglect to moderate comments on their pictures or even be aware that a comment was posted to something they uploaded.
Nonetheless, Flickr is still a great way to get traffic to your website. Photo’s hosted on Flickr are known to rank high in search engines every now and then, and even a link in the caption/description area (nofollwed or not) can draw in some considerable traffic.
So although it won’t help in terms of SEO, creating and uploading pictures can still help to achieve the endgame: getting relevant traffic to your site. Flickr’s other option was to disable all links / HTML from captions and comments, but that would not be addressing the main source of abuse.
It was going to happen eventually, obviously you’ll still get relevant traffic, which is the objecive, but having some PR was always a good bonus - I’m surprised it has taken this long to be honest!
It did take quite a while for them to catch on and actually do something about it, but it’s good that they finally did.