Do image source URLs count towards PR?

[Sharky]

One of my sites has a big image library. There are a large number of other sites out there that reference my images -- so their image src URL points to my site.

The original Brin and Page paper on PageRank talks about links between pages, but it doesn't directly suggest an approach for handling images source URLs.

Does anyone know whether image source URLs count toward PR of some page on the site? Or do images carry their a separate PR-equivalent for image search?

I've read how the Google toolbar estimates PR by walking up the URL path until it finds a ranked page. I've also heard that approach isn't how Google itself works, but maybe a similar approach is applied to image URLs?

Any insight would be appreciated.

[doc_z]

Image source URLs don't count for PR.

[Sharky]

Do you have something concrete to base that on?

How are images ranked in Google's image search?

[dpplgngr]

There's no clear and necessary reason for it to be so.

PageRank is based on pages.

Image listing is based on image name and title.

The two together are enough to account for the order of image listing in the Google Image engine.

If your img src suggestion were true you'd see things like background images, dot.gif, border.gif's in image search.

[coolasafanman]

it makes sense that links to images do not count, because the images (unlike pages containing links) do not contain links to other pages of the site. so, even if an image got rank, it wouldn't be able to pass it on to the pages of the site that count.