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Using free stock photos and its affect on SEO

by TrackerG
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello,

do using images from free stock sites like PixaBay can affect my website ranking? Do Google check if images on websites are already posted somewhere else, and do this have affect on SERP? Of course, I would use only images that are free to use.
#affect #free #photos #seo #stock
  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    It's not usually the images that are ranking. Most popular stock photos are... well, popular. I see no reason to expect that Google would use that against a site.
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    What's your excuse?
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  • Profile picture of the author Mairaj
    Yea if someone reports that the individual is using his/her website image on their website or blog than definitely DMCA take action.

    You can checkout different sort of penalties on Google Webmaster Tool.

    So, keep away yourself these types of silly mistake and try to create your own image for your website in Photoshop.
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  • Profile picture of the author monachus
    You can use stock image photos all right.

    If you edit them in photoshop (not much editing needed), they could even rank in google images.

    What i do is some basic filtering in photoshop, (auto-contrast, auto-color, a little bluring e.t.c.) and save the photo in other format than the original (e.x. jpg to png)

    Following this simple methods i have managed to have some fre pictures featuring in the first places of google images.
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    • Profile picture of the author TechNik
      Originally Posted by monachus View Post

      they could even rank in google images.
      I think this is often overlooked as a traffic source though there does seem to be some luck involved. I had a website that had some original images reach the #1 spot on Google Images for several popular keywords and the pages containing those images had significantly more visitors than the others.
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  • Profile picture of the author TrackerG
    Mairaj, did you even read my first post? I wrote that I would use images from free stock websites like PixaBay. Images on that and similar websites are free to use even in comercial use, and most of them do not even require attribution.
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  • Profile picture of the author mich800
    Does Google even know what an image is other than the file name and alt text?
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  • Profile picture of the author paladinseo
    wont affect your seo at all, there is no duplicate image algo for google
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by paladinseo View Post

      wont affect your seo at all, there is no duplicate image algo for google
      I think what you meant to say is that it will not typically lower the ranking of that URL that the image appears on, which is correct. Google definitely knows if two images are identical via a checksum, so if you are trying to rank duplicate images in the image search that won't work. For various reasons, google will rank variations of the same image in the image search.

      It's potentially possible that google uses the checksum and optical recognition to eliminate duplicate images that are extremely similar, for example, an image that is only different by a single bit. I don't think so, I've seen plenty of image searches where there are a bunch of extremely similar images. Any basic technique to alter the image (resizing, filters, adding a border, or text) should be sufficient. But as others mentioned, it doesn't really generate enough traffic to be worth it (outside of the wallpapers/tee-shirts/poster niches.)
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Google does not know a free photo from a paid one.

        How could they?

        You people talk like Martians.

        DMCA? Give me a break. I can find duplicates of
        just about anything.

        And if you are in china, turkey, iran, russia, cuba,
        venezuela, ukraine, india, pakistan, north korea,
        vietnam, yemen, ......just about 75% of the world,
        nobody can give a rat's behind.

        A real funny thing just occurred to me. Every paid
        and free image site has virtually the SAME
        friggin' images as every OTHER image site!

        And google cares about that? ROTFLMAO!

        Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author Archbob
    Stock photos don't effect SEO. They probably won't show up in google image search if they aren't the original source, but most people don't get any traffic from that anyways.
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    Free Photos for personal or commercial use -- Thousands of free photos for personal or commericial use.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mattdawg841
    You should be absolutely fine using free stock images without it affecting your sep rankings. The only thing I would ad is to make sure that they're quality so they don't bring down the image of your site (low quality images relay a low quality site). And I'll also recommend Dollarphoto.com….they have a ton of super high quality images and they're only $1.

    Hope that helps!
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