SEO - Why Linking To Other People's Images is a Bad Idea

Hosting images that originate from another’s server is a bit of a touchy subject when it comes to blogging. Sometimes you may find an image that you like and simply link to the picture where it exists. This allows it to show up on your page but be hosted by the other site’s server.

Some sites are okay with this and others take great exception, sometimes changing the image from their side to read, “This person is stealing my bandwidth.” This happens when others click on it and can help destroy your good reputation. This also means that they are being charged by their host for allowing you to display your image.

Usually this type of link is not noticed until your website traffic starts to grow and the bandwidth usage on the other site increases. The solution to avoiding an ugly dispute and possibly lots of technical hassles is to host images on your own server. Of course to host images in this way you need to own your own domain and host the blog from there. The problem with many online free blogs is they do not allow you to host images on their servers and will set up their image uploading system so that someone else always hosts the images. This can make you a lot of enemies.

The solution is to own your own blog and host the images yourself. This practice can also help you avoid your pages from loading slowly which easily turns off a reader who may be a potential customer! Most domain hosts supply you with enough bandwidth so that you can sustain the publishing of your own visuals.

Of course to eliminate this type of conundrum the best thing to do is to stay away from visuals unless they can be linked to something on one of your own sites. Linking to an image that belongs to someone else is very problematic in general.

Christopher Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at) Brilliantseo.com

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Twin Tubs
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