The Value of Hotlinking
Images have been a big part of my SEO research. I have even made several blogs for the purpose of experimentation in image SEO. Voodoo Blog was the first such blog. The Definarium came later. I used these blogs (and others) to test the effects of anchor text, ALT tags and other contextual variables on the treatment of images by the Search Engine.
I recently received a comment on the Definarium from a person who wanted to help me understand why hotlinking is bad, because it steals bandwidth. I am aware of this problem and did not wish to advocate bandwidth theft. Here is the email I sent the person who left a comment:
Thank you for your thoughtful comment on my blog.
I am not in favor of unauthorized hotlinking. You are 100% correct in all you wrote regarding the theft of bandwidth from those who can ill-afford it.
What I am espousing is simply awareness that hotlinking can be a very good thing, for those who can afford the bandwidth to allow it.
In order for the performance of search engines to keep improving as regards images, the amount of meta data associated with them has to grow — per image. Because hotlinking offers the SE spiders mutiple perspectives of the same images (each with a unique contextual implication and perhaps even nice ALT tags, if the user has been thoughtful and diligent), the amount of AGGREGATE metadata per image may increase. This is important since individual webmasters will not likely put in the effort to properly annotate images. Also, some images are thematically complex, for example — http://eyepassport.com/sights/images/186.jpg You can imagine that such an image could be described in many different ways, not to mention the possible metaphorical descriptions.
Thanks again for you comment.
Jack Mardack
Related Topic: Division Trust