Flickr and Links
This post is a bit of a rant that’s been building for a while but bear with me! Especially if you use Flickr.
I’ve long thought it strange that whenever you add a link in Flickr, either as part of your profile within a caption for one of your images, they rewrite it to add in a rel=”nofollow”. The effect of this tag is to stop a search engine (which obviously ranks Flickr quite highly) from following the link and therefore helping your own site’s search ranking.
This is a common thing to do in comments (in fact this blog’s comments do that) as a means to avoid spammers improving the search ranking of their phishing sites. However to do it in my own profile and captions has always struck me as ungenerous and somehow against the community spirit of the web.
The above issue aside, as you will know I have this site, and my portfolio site www.importedlight.com and recently I began experimenting with adding links from some of my travel photography to one or other of these sites. However I ran into a problem.
Working in the web analytics industry and using Google Analytics on both my sites, I of course wanted to include the Google Analytics utm_source, medium and campaign tags on the links so I could see how effective they were at driving traffic to my sites. The problem is, if you do this and then make the linked text anything that looks like a URL or domain (i.e. www.importedlight.com) Flickr would rewrite the linked text to be the same as the actual link href. Linked text that didn’t look like a URL (i.e. “My Site”) works just fine. Read the rest of this entry »




























As you may know I use Lightroom quite a bit and the keyword lists I created for Lightroom are one of the most popular things on this site. However its not always easy working your way through the hierarchies of keywords to add them to your images. Even typing the start of a keyword and then using the drop-down list of words that appears is not a one-click process.