if i remember correctly, internal links don't mean jack....if you have tons of pages on your site and links back and forth among them all, that doesnt do anything with rankings....

as far as i know the real links that matter are the external ones, like if the sites your pictures were on linked to your personal site, that would help raise the ranking of your personal site.....
i could be wrong....but then maybe not....

They don't count as heavily, but I was able to bump my site to a very high spot (#2 worldwide) for a very particular search phrase by linking to it from other pages (site content). True, nothing's better than having a link to it from elsewhere, but any links help. Then again Google and its mysterious algorithms keep many great minds at bay...

Here is a non-geek translation guys:

The fact that the page itself has comments has no bearing for Google. What helps is that every time a photographer comments on a picture, the link to that page with a photo is written onto another page. So if 10 of you comment on my picture, suddenly that page has 10 links linking to it, therefore increasing its page ranking.

So yup. Okay I'm in for some ratings too.

And yes, you have some parts correct about Google, but 'on page' content is only one part of how Google works.  Google has over 100 variables they play with in determining the value of a web page.  One of the largest factors is PageRank.  Think of the web as a series of connected pages- Google tries to make sense of this mess through links.

I don't want to go into specifics of what we're doing, but I can assure you that Leaf's page didn't get higher simply because of the 'on-page' content-it has just as much to do with who and how many people linked to his page. I've been doing this for ten years, increased many businesses revenues online and have helped build ClickTracks, an award winning web analytics software.

Well... that was the line I got from Peter himself. I had a decent 60-70% approval rate for half a year and in the last month, it dropped to 20%. Of course all the rejections were the now infamous "thanks, but we are not looking for such image right now". Why I wondered? My technique improved, my selection stringency improved (my approval rate at Shutterstock and iStock is at almost 100% now) yet here almost every picture was being rejected (70 of 84 rejected). So I wrote a message to the admins blasting the reviewers basically insinuating that there was a reviewer out to get me, blah, blah, blah, two days later I got a response and a re-review of my images (additional 7 were accepted).

Anyways... here's a quote "...I took a look at your recent uploads and I approved some more although in most cases I have to agree with the admin who checked them. On StockXpert travel photos don't sell too well, just try searching for Rome and you'll see how few downloads they have. Still, many people want to upload travel stock so we are very selective..."

Anyways to follow up, EVERY SINGLE non travel photo I submitted got accepted recently. I ticks me off because I like travel photography and almost nothing else, but... at least now I know.

Is anyone else starting to think there is a lot of hot air with the Lucky Oliver? All the wonderful things, all the growing sales... just no one's really seeing it, eh? I'm standing at $50 growing at about a $1-$2 a week. That's going to get me a payout by autumn. Not impressive.

Anyways... still got tons of tokens to spend , you guys?