Do images pass link juice?

wondering if there's PR benefit to other sites hotlinking to your images

[mindaugas13]

I tried to search the forums for the answer but couldn't find it. If another trusted site links directly to an image under your domain, does that pass any link juice or trust? Any thoughts?

[IanTurner]

I wouldn't say that it does- but I wouldn't prevent hotlinking on that basis.

[tedster]

Even though we call it hot "linking" it's really a src attribute and not an anchor tag. Although the url does get followed, there's no juice flowing that I know of. For that you need a real link.

[bhartzer]

I don't really think PageRank is passed when someone hotlinks to an image. But, I've noticed that if a lot of people hotlink to an image on your site then that will help your rankings in image search.

I have a cute photo on a site that is highly related to my number one keyword (lots of people hotlink to it). It just so happens that when someone searches for that keyword Google shows the top 3 images in the search result and then Google shows the rest of the results. When you click on the photo above the search results it brings you to the page on my site where that image is located.

So, if you allow people to hotlink to the image and that image shows up above the regular SERPs then that's an extra "bonus". You actually get more traffic because people like to click on the images when they're presented in the regular search results.

In my case, I decided to let people hotlink to the image because it ultimately gives me more traffic. But, this case is kind of unusual: Google doesn't show images in most of the search results.

[julinho]

Even though we call it hot "linking" it's really a src attribute and not an anchor tag. Although the url does get followed, there's no juice flowing that I know of. For that you need a real link.

What if you do have a real link, pointing to an image? Does it help you?

The original PR papers stated that PR was passed among pages, not images (which were considered dead ends).

Moderators, feel free to delete the same question that I posted here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[mindaugas13]

Yeah, I misused the word "hotlink" - what I really meant to ask was: if a page on a high PR site LINKS to an image on your domain, does your site get link juice from it (since the image itself doesn't link back to anything on your site)?

ex if: widget.com/some-post has the following anchor text:
"check out this image of a widget here" and that anchor text links to mywidgetsite.com/images/widget.jpg, which resides on your site.

[moishe]

I have a number of images that have been "hotlinked" to and none of them have PR so I would think that no PR is assigned to images per se, also, as pointed out they are a dead end as bot traffic goes.

Having said this, the more a particular image gets linked to, the more it seems to move up in the image searches on the SE's...

I would say, the only way you will see a PR boost or any other real advantage is if someone links to you like this:

Check out this widget picture and links it to http://www.example.com/widget-pictures-web-page.html

Then the picture is generating a true IB link.