Flickr Loses Some Juice for Search Engines

I was reading today that Yahoo has slapped "no-follow" tags on Flickr's photo owner links. Yahoo owns Flickr, the popular photo sharing Web site.

Incoming links help your search engine visibility...SE's see them as "votes of confidence." The no-follow tag was created to let the SE's know that this link carries no weight...that it shouldn't be included in the algorithm of how valuable a Web page is.

This same no-follow tag is used by most blogging platforms these days in the comments and trackback sections. This was most likely due to reduce the benefits of comment spam. In fact, as Search Engine Roundtable states:

This does not come to a shock to many of us because this has been the pattern of all popular user generated sites. What is next?

Last year the popular user-generated site Squidoo lost most of its search engine mojo in Google. YouTube could be next. In fact, any social media Web site may begin to lose its luster with Web marketers.

If you have been using Flickr or any other social media/user-generated Web sites in your Web marketing, you may want to de-emphasize the time you spend with these.

On the other hand, it's more than just search engine benefits that these sites provide. It's not just search engine spiders that follow links, it's people. And it's not search engines that buy your products and services, it's people.

User-generated sites may not help your search engine visibility in the near future, but they can still be a powerful tool to engage prospects and drive traffic to your Web site.

Rich Brooks
Social Butterfly