Stock Photos And Its Effects On Your Ranking

When you are trying to put up a strong fight against the fierce competition that prevails in your niche, you need to pay attention to many fine details. It becomes even more crucial to pay attention to fine details especially when you are climbing up the ladder of success. So pay attention to the fine details if you want to be successful online. One of the interesting doubts that many webmasters have is whether using stock photos have any negative effects on the website’s ranking. Google always emphasizes the importance of original content and the above doubt is sprouting from the above emphasize placed by Google.

This question has been asked to Matt Cutts, head of the web spam at Google. According to Matt Cutts, the use of stock images do not have any specific impact on your ranking. Google has not started using the images as a ranking factor as yet. So it does not really matter whether you are using an original image or a stock image for your website. Matt Cutts has explained it very clearly that Google does not use images to rank content. You can therefore suit yourself based on your needs.

In terms of user interest, using unique images or original images will certainly boost your visitor’s interest. However, images are not everything in a website; you will have to use them prudently to increase user engagement. Using the right images in your content will certainly help you tell your stories better. If you can get the apt images from the stock images, you can use them without any hesitation. On the other hand, if you have your own original image, which will help you tell the story better, then that is what you should be using for your website. You will have to make your decision here based on the relevance of the image and not just, whether it is original image or not. You just need to make sure that the images that you are using are not too commonly found because if you do, you will not be able to make your website stand out from the rest of the competition even if there are no specific ranking effects.

Another important factor however regarding the use of images to which you should pay attention to is that you are giving adequate clues to Google on what the image is all about by giving appropriate image title and caption details. Matt Cutts however does not rule out the possibility that image quality can become a ranking signal in future. Starting to use original image if not now could pay you in the future.

If you should choose to use stock images, try to download your images from quality sites and do not settle for substandard images as it can affect your website’s quality and your overall brand image as well. It is worthwhile spending time in sourcing your images and your stock image sites.

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