"Whether I earn money from it or not, my vision of beauty was shared by the maxium amount of people it could be....what more could a legitimately artistically motivated person want?"

I'm here to make money, not massage my 'artistic' ego by having my work 'shared' (which can damage my income several ways).  My intent is to create highly saleable content that sends a message, while incorporating my creativity into the process.  If I wanted to soley be an 'artist' and share my work to benefit humanity, I'd buy a van so I could live by the river.  I'll stick to that as a hobby if I so want.

And so you should if that is your focus.  I'm not suggesting by that monologue that everyone should be like me, I was merely responding to the previous poster who made some points that really made me think, which I always appreciate.

And I guess we just disagree on what will make you more money.  You seem to think waging a fight in which you'll have as much effect as a gnat chomping on an elephant and scouring the net for improper uses of your images to be more worthwhile than using that time making new ones and engaging in other, positive forms of marking your images, *shrugs* maybe you are right.  I don't see it but whatever blows your whistle...

edit: duplicate post

The link was given to you by hummingbird, which you conveniently skipped,

The link provided by hummingbird has nothing whatsoever to do with inbound links...did you read it yourself?  Seriously man, you gotta stop smoking whatever it is your are smoking....

It's about the fact that their OUTBOUND links are no-follow and their INTERNAL links are do-follow...and the argument (or at least so it seems to me) is totally irrelevant as there's nothing "illegal" about making outbound links nofollow.  Wordpress blog comments are nofollow by default, TWITTER links are nofollow...gee, wordpress and twitter must be breaking the law too...*rolls eyes*

Although I must admit that the nofollow bit was something I didn't know.  I actually read somewhere not long ago that pinterest links were DOfollow...guess they changed things up at some point. And this admittedly does give the site less power seo wise, but still not zero as that article is claiming - it's been proven that no follow links do still help out a page, just not anywhere near so much as do follow links.  Google still records them and it knows how many do follow links a page has and how many no follow (this too is where you need diversity - if all your links are do-follow that isn't natural, so nofollow links are important to keep your back link profile out of the nasty crosshairs of google's algorithm).  Twitter links are no-follow and they can help sites enormously in the serps (which is why there are so many spammers on twitter) Still I must admit to disappointment at reading the no follow thing.  However I'm no lawyer, but no follow out bound links are laughably far from illegal and also the "poor anchor" text link that that article talks about hurting a site is also total rubbish.  Even more so these days in the era of Penguin we need more and more naked url non-anchored links, because that is what the search engines see as natural.  

And more links from social media is what the google counts as being interesting and engaging to viewers....for a reason, the internet is turning more and more toward social networks, and so each google algorithm upgrade tends to mirror and use that data by becoming more and more influenced by social signals.  Which is part of why twitter (and I hope now pinterest too) can considerably help SEO wise even with no follow links.  

And I don't think I have said anything disrespectful to you, so I will assume that your post above is talking to other people.

You assumed correctly, I certainly wasn't talking about you.

I'm a '"new" user that's been here a couple years.  Yes....I'm a sneaky pinterst emplyee that forsaw this debate and registered an account here in advance back in 2008...try looking up the date I joined rather than just my post count.

As for why I'm commenting here?  Well pretty much because I see what seems to be a lot of misplaced anger and there's certainly some serious misinformation (especially about the SEO elements and benifits to pinning and repinning) that would be better off corrected, or atleast I saw a discussion that was overwhelmingly one sided and to which I might be able to bring a fresh perspective and something new to think about.  But I see my perspective isn't particularly welcome...

And so an equally valid answer to that question (seeing as only the people who share the majority opinion seem to get treated with respect) is:  Bloody good question...

Panda and Penguin came about to penalize spammers who use shifty SEO techniques like keyword stuffing.  I wonder if they're likely to penalize Pinterest for their dodgy link practices?  I hope so but in the eyes of Google, I'm not sure that it's dodgy enough.

Also Penguin and Panda were more about duplicate content and inbound anchor link over-optimisation, nothing to do with keyword stuffing....that was taken care of years ago...

RE:  You clearly don't understand Google, SEO or Pinterest.  

Really?  funny, I'm about to say the same thing...

RE 'Re-pinning' has no effect on SEO (not yours anyway) and if it does it will go against you because if you get enough backlinks on the same domain linking to the same page, Google treats it as spam and drops you off the search.  

Absolute rubbish - ever hear of a blogroll link?  millions of blogs around the world link to millions of other sites with blogroll links - these are sitewide links that link out from every page on a site...sites don't get banned from them.  Sites get banned mainly due to unnatural backlink anchor profiles, ie all the inbound links to a page are anchored with whatever keyword the spammer is trying to rank for.  Repins are perfectly safe to get in bulk though because they are anchored as images - there is no anchor text and so n chance of an anchor text penalty there and the anchor text that is used on them is the domain name from the site they were pinned on.  Once again google doesn't "ban" sites for lots of links using their domain name, in fact they expect it.  Whenever I've had a shot go viral on dA or 500px a whole bunch of bloggers will make posts sharing my shots and linking back to my site for my root domain name - it's never hurt me in the serps at all.


RE: Only one backlink will be counted by Google and that's the first one.  

Once again you are wrong.  Repeated backlinks from the same domain give diminished backlink power it's true, but they still give it.  I have a page on 500px that is a PR 3, it has NO links to it from outside sources, only links from inside it's own domain.  If only the first link to my page from the 500px domain was counted I'd have a n/a page...not a pr 3 page. It's a PR3 page though because I've had shots go viral and get on the front page of 500px and get hundreds of votes and faves, each one is a link back to that shot from the posters account and each shot links to my profile page, also every follwer of mine (about 1600 now) link back to my page from their friends page and to every new shot that I post from their friends photos pages....in the ends it's these thousands upon thousands of links from the ONE domain that make my page there a PR3...

As well as make article and blog comment spam,  spammers also create online databases (rental property listings agregated off another site for instance) for the very purpose of creating sites with thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages they control, why?  To create backlinks for their portfolio of money making sites...this wouldn't be a viable tactic if only one link from these data base sites counted...it doesn't, they all count and that's why they use them.  The first one just counts more beacause as well as being a link it's also increasing the overall TLD (top level domain) profile linking into the page, which is one of the other high ranking factors.

RE: What planet are you on?

One where I do my research before I talk about a topic, you should join me....

This made me laugh a little.  Your images will get stolen and everything will be fine or it won't. 

I can see how you'd get a laugh out of it.  But seriously, it's also the truth.  Your images WILL get stolen (if they are any good) to pretend otherwise is to be naive.  Do you have enough time or will to scour the net looking for your images? and then the means to find out if they were purchased from an agency when you are on perhaps 7 or 8 different agencies selling your images under a (more or less) "use as much as you want" llicense?

I know I don't.  I'd rather be sitting back on my balcony admiring the sunset or perhaps if I'm in a more motivated mindset make new images - fretting about something I can never control is something I try to make a habit not to do...

enjoy your stress!

Well I didn't have time to read the whole thread, just the first page and it seems (at least at that stage) to be Helix vs everyone else.  Well you can throw another vote in Helix's corner.

I just completely remade my website and heavily incorporated pinterest buttons on it, why?

Well for starters social media drives more traffic than google these days, and Pinterest has surged to be the 3rd biggest social media site now, some websites report that pinterest drives them more traffic than facebook.  But aside from the direct promotional benefits you also get some pretty kick ass seo value out of it.  First off goggle is placing more and more emphasis on social media signals to influence search rankings and secondly every pinterest pin (and here's the important part - also REPIN) is a link back to the original image. 

The main critea goggle uses to sort search results is backlinks.  Every backlink your page, site, youtube video or STOCK IMAGE gets is counted by google as a vote for that page.  It's a lot more complicated than that and there are many other factors but there is a reason we have so much blog comment spam and articles in online article databases that make no sense is because its the way spammers build backlinks to trick google into thinking their page is more important and more interesting/engaging than it is.

So next time someone pins one of your shutterstock photos and you want to get all in a huff about it - you should take into consideration that it wasn't some evil mastermind lurking in a basement somewhere trying to steal something off you - it's a real person that likes one of your shots and want's to share/promote it, I'm sure 99% of the time in the pinner's mind they are doing something nice for you.  And then on top of that you are seeing real world seo and traffic driving benefits out of it.  If it becomes popular and gets tens (or hundreds) of repins then that is tens or hundreds of votes for your image/page in google's eyes.  It also makes any pages that page links to get a "stronger" vote from that page, and what pages do your images normally link to?  Well your folio page for one, sometimes other pics of yours.  So those backlinks that come in and make your image more important to google, also make it's votes more important which helps make your other shots more important.  So in reality every pin (and repin) you get helps out your whole folio in a tiny/tiny/tiny way.  But like like 25cent sales these tiny factors add up...

On an aside,

I used to know a girl who's job it was for her boss to download watermarked pictures his company might want to use and remove the watermarks from them.  This was a despicable act and an intention to do the wrong thing.  But it also shows that if you put your images online - watermarked or not they WILL be stolen.

If you can't handle this fact then get . out of this career and go do something else.  Or you can be smart, play the numbers, realise that some images WILL get stolen but you'll still make enough money to do well out of it..or you wont and you'll go do something else. 

But either way getting all pissed off about someone pinning one of your photos?....man...come on, get a life people...

You totally miss my point Anglee.

First off from that history tab I then have to navigate to the individual months that I uploaded the EVO images to see which ones I uploaded, even then the images aren't linked to any page that can show me download or sales stats.  And that was the whole point of my question.

I first asked you how I could see my EVO sales stats, to which you told me a module was being created that would allow that in the future but for now I had to click on them one by one.  So I asked you if there's a way to bring up a list of my EVO images so that I CAN CLICK ON THEM ONE BY ONE to see sales stats and you give me a method where not only do I NOT get one unified list of evo submissions (I have to try to guess which months I uploaded evo images during and select them one at a time) but a method that DOESN'T link to any sort of download or sales stats?  *scratches head*

Very odd answer you gave....I assume the real answer to my question is " no, there is no way to bring up a single list of all your evo images"

Such rudimentary sales tracking tools are foregone (FOR YEARS) in favor of site look upgrades, removal of forums, and playing around with stupid social networking things.  Why don't you try to get the basics down first before you waste your time with trivialities?

How about my second question Anglee...is there any way to bring up a list of just your own evo images? (preferably listed from most sold to least)

Anglee,

Thanks for the reply...I'm really trying hard not to be overly negative here but there's no way I'm going to click on each EVO image separately and sit there with a calculator or whatever adding them up.  From the best I've been able to tell there isn't even a way to find your evo images in your folio without browsing every single folio page and looking for the evo mark, is there?

When I hit my portfolio link down the bottom of the page it brings up my folio, no tab for evo/standard just everything mushed in together.  When I try to search through my folio (as on the search results page you DO get the evo & standard tabs) I can't find any search terms that will bring up the whole folio.  I search for my name and get no hits, I search for evo and get no hits, I leave the search field blank and get no hits.

Even when I go into my upload history there are no links from the submitted image to the viewable image.  And your advanced search page has no option to input photographer name....so how am I even supposed to bring up a list of my EVO images assuming I was motivated enough to click on each one?

You've had the EVO section up for how long now?  Years I believe, and still no way whatsoever for artists to track their EVO submissions and sales numbers...  Doesn't that seem a little odd?