Flickr Follows Wikipedia - No Google Juice for External Websites
Like Wikipedia and del.icio.us, Flickr too joins a growing list of websites that are ranked very high in search engines but do not pass any link juice to external websites.
Flickr has recently enabled the nofollow tag for all HTML links placed in photo descriptions and comments - that means Flickr will not pass any PageRank benefits to external sites. See example.
And though Flickr has nofollowed all external links, they still want external websites (who post Flickr photos) to link to the original photo page without using the nofollow tag (check the HTML code generated by Flickr when you want to link to some photo).
Surprisingly, the nofollow tag is not applied if the URL in the photo description points to another page on Flickr. And external links in descriptions of Flickr Sets and Photo Pools continue to pass PageRank as noted by Jeff Muendel but am sure that will change very soon.
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Well, we can always add the nofollow to Flickr links. The ToS of Flickr says images have to link back to Flickr.
But does it also exclude the actual photos from Google images? I think not. So effectively, if your images rank well in Google Image index, and you have your URL in the description then visitors to the photo page are likely to click thru to your website. Especially if you promise more information in the description.
This is quite bad news for any website containing images or wallpapers like me. But I can give the link below the image as shown above in example. Ya the images will rank gud in google image search for sure.
Not at all surprising move by flickr. It has to do everything with spammers. As back as 2002, people used to link sites thru guestbook. This is something similar.
In short where ever there is a scope for user generated content, ppl will abuse initially and eventually either a nofollow or a penalty by google will kick in.
This is the natural and inevitable consequence of people abusing Flickr to improve their search engine results.
Since the entire point of Google’s rankings is to show what OTHER people think of a site, not what a site’s creators think of their site, removing sources of input that are highly likely to be site owners pimping their own sites is just the right thing to do.
The vast majority of external links on Flickr in user-generated content are links to that user’s own stuff. These should not count for ranking.
Add that to the fact that there are people deliberately trying to boost their Google ranking on Flickr (e.g. from the upfront and honest, such as linking to their site from every picture they post, to the dishonest, such as comment spam), and are you really surprised?
Flickr is doing the right thing here. Sure, there’s collateral damage, but they cannot check every link.