Infographics for SEO - How Are You Faring?

[webindia123]

We recently started this FOR SEO not seeing much improvement !

Since last 3 months we targeted some money spinning products but not seeing much improvement. Any one of you have any good experience in using infographics for SEO.

Cheers !
Lalit Kumar

[tedster]

Infographics are only as good as their content - that content needs to encourage new linking from those in your market. I haven't done much with infographics personally, it always seemed like a fad to me, and one that was running out of gas this year. However, I do know of several people who got great results a year or so back.

[linkbuildr]

1) Awesome content/research/data

2) Host site isn't junk

3) Good outreach beyond the free infographic "directories"

It's a small piece of the link profile pie and it's cool to do a couple times a year in my books...

[Robert Charlton]

From Google's point of view, infographics are subject to various types of misuse, and Matt Cutts, in a number of venues last year, expressed some reservations about them. Some of Matt's comments were discussed in this WebmasterWorld thread....

Infographic Links Might Be Discounted In The Future?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/4474209.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Major problems, as Matt described, is that links are often embedded in the infographic in a way that obscures who's actually getting the linking credit, and (my interpretation of his comments) that information in infographics is perhaps more difficult to fact check than written material might be. Infographics can "bartered" in the same way that widgets were bartered, and this creates some doubt about their reliability.

Much of the discussion in the above thread came from this interview...

Matt Cutts and Eric Talk About What Makes a Quality Site
7/9/2012 by Eric Enge
[stonetemple.com...]

I would quote some of the same comments that martinibuster quoted, but since he's already cited them, let me add these, which relate specifically to cautions to apply...

Any infographics you create will do better if they’re closely related to your business, and it needs to be fully disclosed what you are doing. The big key is that the person publishing the infographic has to know, and agree with, including an endorsement to your site as attribution with the infographic. Even then, there is reason to believe that the link is more about the barter to get the infographic than a real endorsement of your site.

...I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree.

[webindia123]

Inferring interview, Matt Cutts is consistent in only ONE thing giving same answer to many questions. Now that's spam too :P

"Poorly written, factually incorrect, repetitive"

Heard this so many times that listening to matt cutts now make ears bleed :P

And that's why I personally stopped following his repetitive scary views :) and relying more on internal experiments with guinea sites, discussing with peers.

Matt raised doubts about quality of infographics but the same observation quoted by him can be implied to how to videos, textual content, images, bulk listings, directory inclusions, profiles, wiki entries etc.

Greatly researched infographics are sexier than dull textual content.

Albeit links were suggestive.... thanks a ton Robert. At least one thing is clear targeting infographic will not help in recent future. But we will try for couple of months more.


thanks @others
lalit kumar

[tedster]

A good infographic can still be a good marketing method - it's just that it needs to work directly with your market and as a kind of "SEO trick". If your market is on Pinterest, for example, your infographc may explode in popularity if people find value in what it offers. If they write blogs and you've saved them a lot of work or provided something they find valuable enough to share, then bang, you've got direct traffic and a natural link that's probably on theme for your site.

[edited by: tedster at 2:20 am (utc) on May 2, 2013]

[webindia123]

@tedster That purely sort of natural link building :)