Shouldn't You Embedding Images in Blog Posts?

Embedding images in a blog post can helps in saving your blog's storage capacity (hosting), etc.

But while you are getting benefits of doing so, there may also things you need to think about: "Is it bad for SEO?"

Technically, when you are embedding an image from another site, it means that you are also giving a backlink for the web page of a site you have taken the image from.

By default, if you have not changing anything, just so you know that it is a DoFollow link you are giving away.

This is why many sites are getting backlinks without any anchor text (blank) at all.

Imagine if you have been published hundreds or even thousands of blog posts and most of them will consists of 1-2 embedded images.

Do you think it will really done nothing and won't harm your blog?

Take embedding pictures from Flickr as an example.

You want to save your blog hosting and then you think that you will need to create an account or search for images over there that you are going to embed on your contents.

It is literally you are going to give quality backlinks to every Flickr's image link sources.

While you are doing that, I should remind you as well about how MOZ's Spam Score Signals are measured.

I don't actually care about MOZ metric, but in case you do, its number 20th signal that is used is number of external outlinks. It is said that:

"Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low external outlinks."

So, while your content numbers will raising, your blog spam score can also be higher when the more embedded images are used.

And it is bad for certain reason.

For those who are offering paid content placement or guest post like me, it is important for our blog to get low spam score since clients will also undergo their own analysis on which the best sites they're going to get links.

Meanwhile, the more outlinks a blog is giving away, the bigger chance that the spam score will be increased as well.

Fortunately, I have analyzed and read the other blogger's experiences that embedding images from site like Flickr and else may giving the different result compared with embedding images from social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or even Instagram posts.

I have seen many blogs or news sites that are producing viral contents sourced from social media.

No matter how many embedded images or even videos they are using on published contents, sites are keep on growing and there's no addition for the their spam score.

However, if I should doing this, I prefer to add the rel NoFollow attribute in image link sources since I have no reason to do the otherwise.

But keep in mind as well that embedding images from social media may also the cause of bad user experience for blog's readers.

I mean, people keep on deleting their accounts or posts as they want.

And when they do, your published blog posts may not as interesting as before since the embedded media will no longer appeared.

I should also remind you that you may not need to rely on traffic from image result since the embedded images will likely out of your optimization strategy.

As the conclusion for this short post, there are things you should keep on remembering:

1. Add NoFollow attribute for embedded images from social media.
2. Reach out the blog or site owners to get permission on the usage of their images and tell them how you will use them on your blog (upload or embed). Do this as well if you are going to use an image as your post's thumbnail.
3. Ask for a way to credit the image owners.
4. Monitoring your blog performance as usual especially its Spam Score.

For the most part, embedding images to a blog post may affecting your SEO. But it doesn't always mean bad. There are still positive impacts you can earn as long as you know how.

For me myself, I don't see why I should embed an image on this blog for now.

I just simply write things I have in mind and if there will be supported media I need to use, I will get the images from Pixabay or other sites under Creative Common Zero (CC0) license.