Search Engine Journal

Flickr today took away a major source of link juice for the social media marketers and search engine optimization link builders who were using its description area for link building via installing a NoFollow attribute on outbound links which Flickr members add to their photo descriptions.

What does this mean?

Well if you were dependent upon the link juice from Flickr photo descriptions this means that the PageRank or site authority of Flickr will no longer be passed to the sites you linked to.

However, the fact that Flickr is NoFollowing external links may give more authority to the natual internal links within Flickr, making it more of an all around authority site and raising the value of its photo pages in search engine rankings.

Meaning that link may not give you the juice it once did, but if your company uploads images to Flickr and properly optimizes the title, tags and description … you can still rank highly for your brand name or specific terms and brand control your Flickr stream with relevant images and links to your site … which still send traffic.

Flickr therefore is as stong, if not stronger, of a social and reputation management tool as it ever was and if you’re lucky, a sales driving machine.