flickr : Natural Search Blog

Google Photos To Compete With Flickr?

The Google Operating System blog reports that Google is likely changing the name of their Picasa photo sharing service to “Google Photos”.

A few other features are due to rollout as well, including licensing options, email photo uploads, and tagging of people in pics. (more…)

Popularity: 12% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 07/01/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, Image Optimization flickr, Google, Google Photos, image sharing, Picasa

Flickr As New YouTube Killer?

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reports that video is coming soon to Flickr.

This is great news, and I think it could become an overnight major competitor to YouTube — having both types of media available via one site/service makes for a lot of convenience.

Though, people may not realize that it’s already been possible to a small degree, if you upload an animated GIF to Flickr (see this example where I uploaded an animated sequence of a glider’s movement from Conway’s Game of Life).

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/17/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (3) | Comments RSS | Filed under: General, Image Optimization flickr, Yahoo, YouTube

Flickr Starts Nofollowing

A couple of my colleagues, Brian Brown and Jeff Muendel, identified that Flickr has begun NOFOLLOWing hyperlinks in their photo profile pages. I’ve confirmed this and have a few more details to add. (more…)

Popularity: 47% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 02/21/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (3) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Image Optimization, Link Building, PageRank, SEO, Search Engine Optimization flickr, image SEO, Image-Search-Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Using Flickr to Optimize for Yahoo Image Search

Google Blogoscoped reports that Yahoo’s Image Search now particularly likes Flickr content, so this may be incentive for webmasters to use Flickr “as a kind of Yahoo search engine optimization”. My frequent readers know that I’ve been advocating using Flickr for image search optimization for some time now, and I’ve been speaking on this subject at Search Engine Strategies conferences as well.

The Blogoscoped mention of Yahoo’s love for Flickr content is particularly timely, since Yahoo! announced back in June that they were permanently shutting down Yahoo! Photos in favor of their Flickr property, and the final closing date is tomorrow, September 20th.

Previously, I’d railed a bit against Yahoo! because I’d seen a lot of evidence that they didn’t spider/index Flickr content as well or comprehensively as Google did — altogether ironic since Yahoo owns Flickr. Just as with the anecdotal reports in the Blogoscoped post, I’m seeing nice indications that my earlier criticism of Yahoo’s lack of inclusion of Flickr content may now be completely resolved. (more…)

Popularity: 16% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/19/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (1) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Image Optimization, Yahoo flickr, Image Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, SEO, Yahoo, yahoo-image-search

Flickr, why have you screwed up the ALT text?!?

Flickr,
you do a lot that I love - you’re easy to use, and you’ve built-in such elegantly simple and strong features. You’re engineered to function well for SEO, too - your pages are built with spider-friendly URLs, you have multiple link hierarchies, and you allow users to enter in lots of custom text which can allow for optimal TITLEs, H1 text, description captions, user-tagging, and cool geotagging. you even have a fairly cool blog to communicate with your community of users. But, you’ve messed something up this year that irritates the heck out of me:

Flickr’s ALT text is blank on the image pages!

Yes, it’s true - on each image’s main page, the image has nothing in the ALT portion of the image:

I’m pretty sure that your ALT text was working in the past, but at some point, one of your developers made it so that the image’s custom title text no longer gets populated into the IMG ALT parameter, reducing one of the prime signals that inform search engines as to what keywords apply to an image.

Search engines aren’t the only ones that use that ALT text — it’s also important for the vision-impaired who surf the internet using “talking browsers”. Yeah, yeah — I know — why would the vision-impaired be surfing Flickr to begin with? Well, they can run across the pages when searching for various types of information, just like everyone else.

Please, please, Flickr: fix your ALT text!

Yours truly,
A Devoted Fan

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 05/09/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Image Optimization, SEO flickr, image-alt, image-alt-text, img-alt, SEO

Images & Search Session at SES NYC, 2007

As promised, here’s the copy of my preso from the Images & Search panel discussion at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, April 2007.

Also, here’s the Image Sharing Sites Comparison Chart that I created while researching out the potential for improving sites’ traffic through integration with social sharing services.

I see that one blogger, Morpheus Media, posted a good bulleted summary of the Images & Search session.

My new company, Netconcepts, does SEO consulting and web development. As I mentioned, the area which I was hired to work upon is some software service that Netconcepts provides which I describe as a near turnkey SEO solution for dynamically generated websites. One area where I do research is in using image sharing sites like Flickr to improve rankings for sites such as online product catalogs which have lots of photographs. Contact me if you’re interested in these services, or if you have any questions about optimizing for image search or through photo sharing services.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/16/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Content Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Optimization flickr, Image-Search-Optimization, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, SES-Conference

Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites - SES Presentation

Here is the full Comparison Chart of Image Sharing Sites which I mentioned in my presentation on Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites at the SES Chicago ‘06 Conference. Also, here is my PowerPoint presentation on Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites.

There are quite a lot of Image Sharing Sites out there currently, but only a few of them stand out as best-in-class for potential SEO benefit purposes. Read on for a few more notes about this.

(more…)

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 12/06/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (4) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Blog Optimization, Content Optimization, Image Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization flickr, Image Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, Image-Sharing-Sites, ses

Is Web 2.0 Bogus as a Business Model?

For all of us who survived the exuberance of the dot-bombs era, a little blog entry by my friend, Randy Weber, entitled “Business Development 2.0 is BS 1.0” could serve as a nice dose of logic amid all the hype going on.

In his post, he lists out some salient points on why some of the Web 2.0 companies’ business plans are woefully lacking. It makes some sense. After all, if you’re sharing your core content and intellectual property (in the form of free apps), anyone can replicate your site, and they might just do it better than you, and you won’t see any of the money they’re making!

Web 2.0 maybe doesn’t have a simple definition beyond “I know it when I experience it”, but at base it seems to be founded on user-generated content and syndication of that content along with application services. So, businesses based on Web 2.0 would seem to be counter-intuitive to the normal mechanics of classic biz, and those businesses founded on it might have a lot more risk associated with them.

I think there are just a few caveats to Randy’s post, though. Read on and I’ll explain.

(more…)

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/30/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: General AdSense, del.ici.us, flickr, Google, konfabulator, thin-affiliates, Web-2.0, Yahoo

Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization

I’ve previously blogged about optimization for Image Search. But, images can also be used for optimization for regular web search as well. Where online promotion is concerned, it appears to be an area for advantage which remains largely untapped. Many pros focus most of their optimization efforts towards the more popular web search results, and don’t realize that optimizing for image search can translate to good overall SEO.

Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing sites in the world, with loads of features that also make it qualify as a social networking site. Flickr’s popularity, structure and features also make it an ideal vehicle for search engine optimization. So, how can image search optimization be done through Flickr? Read on, and I’ll outline some key steps to take. (more…)

Popularity: 12% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/24/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (10) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Image Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization flickr, Image-Search-Optimization, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Flickr Adds Geotagging Features

In a move that proves that the people behind flickr are still channeling the Web 2.0 mass conscious, flickr announced this week that they’re adding Geotagging features to their already-robust suite of image management products.

As you may recall, I previously blogged a bit about the rise of geotagging, particularly geotagging of photos, and I had said that it seemed to be a really strong idea with a lot of potential uses. It’s gratifying to see that a service like flickr (and a company like Yahoo!) also believes that it will be strategically beneficial.

The number of people who have been geotagging or who even know about it is likely a relatively low percentage of the online populace, I’d guess (partly for the reason that most people don’t have a GPS device to tell them a location’s longitude and latitude). Now that a top-ranked photo site is supporting it expressly, droves of users will become educated about it, and experiment with it. By doing this, flickr is propelling the trend into the mainstream, increasing the likelihood that it’ll be more widely adopted.

Flickr’s new geotagging utilities were built by mashing-up their image management utilities with Yahoo! Maps, allowing users to drag pix onto a mapped location of where the image was taken in order to associate the photo with the geotag. Also, it appears that users could now use a graphic map as a navigational interface to browse geographic locations and then pull up any publicly-available photos associated with that location. Read on for more info.

(more…)

Popularity: 9% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/01/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (6) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Content Optimization, Image Optimization, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Maps, Yahoo flickr, GeoTagging, geotags, image-search, images, Yahoo