Anchor text pointing to an image

Does Google appreciate it?

[Tonearm]

Does Google take notice of anchor text that points to an image, or must it point to a page?

[Petra Kaiser]

After one year no noticeable progress, while on-page pictures react slow but fine.

[potentialgeek]

Does Google count a link to an image as a link to your site (as if it were a link to a page), i.e., a "vote" for your page/site?

p/g

[tedster]

PR is defined as a vote for a page. There is no such thing -- in the patent at least -- as a "vote for a site". But a tangle comes in because technically, there is no such thing as a "page", only a url. So what we are asking here is if an image url counts as a "page" in the PageRank sense.

It really is a moot point, I think, since an image url cannot "contain" a link to another url. So even if Google did bother to calculate PR for an image, that PR could not circulate to any other url.

I've done some checking, and every image url I put into my address bar shows a gray toolbar. I think the answer here is "no".

[Tonearm]

What I actually mean is, does a link on my Blue Widget page with relevant anchor text to another photo of my blue widget on the same domain "count" as far as the anchor text if it's pointing directly to the image and not a page?

Sorry for being unclear before, but that's interesting about an inbound link straight to an image too.

[longen]

It might have similiar seo value as that of an ALT tag.

[Tonearm]

The reason I ask is it seems like anchor text on a page is a big factor for Google, and I wonder if that holds true for anchor text pointing straight to an image. I could be wrong in my anchor text observation to begin with though.

[rainborick]

I don't see how a link to an image can ever help a site's rankings. The search engines don't index graphics files. Only their image search systems pay any real attention to image file URLs, and so a link would only potentially benefit image searches. Since image files aren't in the index, they aren't recognized as a part of the site and, as tedster points out, they don't have PageRank so they presumably don't receive any other link-related benefits, and since they can't link out to other URLs they can't pass on any of those link-related benefits to the rest of the site. I think that all pretty well covers the issue.

[tedster]

Re-reading this thread, I now think the question may be this: if a link points to an image file URL and uses anchor text, does that anchor text count as an ON-PAGE factor? (Not whether it helps the image that it targets to rank.)

If that's it, I really can't say for sure. I never link directly to image files. Even for enlargements, I always put the image in an HTML page.

Since image files aren't in the index...

But image files are now folded into "Universal Search" results on Google, so we may be in a new moment here.

[Tonearm]

You've got it tedster. Sorry it's so unclear.