Is an Image link classed as an outbound link?

[DanielCoe]

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Hi,

Quick question:

If I use a feed that has, say an image:

img src="http://www.johnlewis.com/123.jpg"

Do the search engines follow this link? Is this classed as an outbound link?

Or is it only classed as an outbound link, if it includes an a href=""?

Do search engines follow image src links or only a href="" links?

Thanks

Daniel

[Darren]

As far as I'm aware, it isn't counted as an outbound link, but some bots will crawl it. For example, google will crawl it for it's image archive, unless the merchant has blocked that directory with robots.txt or whatever.

Interesting question, though. I'd be interested to know if anyone knows any different!

[Marc Gear]

even if it is an inbound link - the page that gets the PR would be the JPG itself, rather than any HTML or actual content - and the jpg doesn't link off to anywhere else so it can't pass on its benefit from the inbound links

[angelabx]

Very interesting.

Would it pass PR to the whole John Lewis site.

I'd be interested to know.

Would impact all those who host images on a separate domain to spread bandwidth.

You could be leaking PR to your image server!

Um?

[Marc Gear]

Originally posted by angelabx
Would it pass PR to the whole John Lewis site.

no it shouldn't do. it'll just mean that that image is recorded as more relevant for keywords in whatever link text is used.

for instance linking like this:

<a href="http://www.johnlewis.com/image.jpg">Fish</a>

will mean that image.jpg would be more likley to be returned when searching for 'fish'

Since the image itself contains no link to the merchants site (its a binary and hence probably invisible to the search engine robot) it wont pass on PR