Relevant sites hotlink my images. Does Google see it as backlinks?

[Marvin Hlavac]

I noticed a couple of relevant websites have recently hotlinked some pictures from my site. Some of their forum users did this. It doesn't bother me too much, as I don't think this will keep on happening too often to concern me. But more out of curiosity, it crossed my mind that perhaps there is a slight possibility that Google could view this as a (good) backlink? Or does Google consider only text links as backlinks?

My site is only 6 months old, and this hotlinking occurred only very recently, so I think I have no way of determining (yet) myself how Google views these hotlinks.

By the way, how long does it usually take for Google to notice a new backlink?

[tedster]

Google usually "notices" a new backlink very quickly, but the value of that link builds over the following months.

The image hotinking is something else. Even though we call it "hotlinking" it's not a true anchor element - it's a src attribute for an image element. Google certainly takes note of those urls, but it doesn't seem that they treat them like backlinks. NoPR boost, for example, andof course there's no "anchor text".

Some people who find image search traffic valuable have reported that hotlinking can knock their url out of the image search results. Others have noticed that hotlinking from a site with adult content can get the SafeSeaarch filter applied to their non-adult images.

Image Search is not nearly as sophisticated or relevant as text search is right now. It's more like the pioneer days on the frontier, and certainty about how it all works is hard to come by.

[Marvin Hlavac]

Thanks much for reply.

Just a last question. You mentioned "anchor text". If a website gives me a backlink containing no anchor text, but only a link consisting of my URL http://www.example.com/ - will Google potentially count it as a backlink, and could such link contribute to PR?

[conor]

Yes, if its not a hotlink to an image, but is an actual link to a page - less value than an anchored text link, but a 'vote' none the less

[Marvin Hlavac]

So much talk about "anchor text" made me worried a plain old URL placed on a page does nothing these days ;)

Thanks tedster and conor

[rocco]

Imaging you were a google image search engineer trying to improve the search constantly: I guess somewhen in future it will be interesting to get hotlinked a lot. The best backlinks are also those which existed before pagerank.