I was speaking with a client in a highly competitive industry yesterday. He’s a reformed link buyer – hasn’t bought a link in 7 months. The only problem is that all of his competitors are buying links and kicking his ass for some key phrases.

He wanted to know what could be done about this injustice. I told him to root for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo, and Bing to be a huge success. Until Google has a serious competitor in the search space, they will continue to be our internet overlords.

Wouldn’t it be great if Google had to treat SEO’s & webmasters like customers, rather than “Operators of Interest?”  I think it’s a pretty sad state when it is “excellent news” that Google now actually notifies a webmaster when they have processed a reconsideration request. Excellent news? More like BFD.

Here’s how I believe the reconsideration request should work:

• Webmaster fully and truthfully completes a reconsideration request Wizard  which walks the webmaster through the  Google webmaster guidelines & highlights common compliance issues
• Google Immediately acknowledges receipt of the request and has 10 business days to respond
• The response, at minimum, informs the webmaster what areas of his site do not conform to the guidelines and what penalty has been assessed.
• Google informs the webmaster that his penalty will be removed within X days/weeks/months after coming into compliance.

That, my friends, would be excellent news.

Wait a second……….. you didn’t come here to read my rant on Google – you want that Juicy PR9 link, right?  Well, as a reformed link buyer, I figured I should probably check out the link buying scene that my client was discussing. That led me to a popular forum, where I found this:

pr9 link selling 300$

Listed: Yesterday
Description: i’m selling hacked pr9 website. price 300$ i will guarantee you .
admin @ xxx. com  add me msn please.

Hmm… that looks kind of interesting. Not that I would do it myself, but interesting enough to add this Chap to my MSN and got an immediate response. He was happy to provide me with the url  (A government page) and even a discount. He would drop the price to $250 for 10+ links. Hmm… not bad, especially considering the following exchange, excerpted directly from my chat window:

XXX says:
where are u from
Chuck says:
us
XXX says:
nice
XXX says:
did you come in turkey ?
Chuck says:
no
XXX says:
ok
XXX says:
if you will buy pr9 backlink.. you will get a pr10.

Wow. I’ve been at this SEO thing for a few years now, but didn’t realize until today that buying a PR9 link would get me a PR 10!

So what do you think – will this guy get rich off his hacked PR9 pages? Would you buy one?

—————————————-

Disclaimer: We Build Pages does not condone buying links under any circumstances – let alone on hacked pages.

Jim’s note: When Chuck told me the title of this post I about fell over laughing so hard… oh what a terrible tease of a post title.

FYI, for those wondering, We Build Pages doesn’t buy or sell links anymore.  We can, however, sell you content that may attract some great links.

Thanks for participating!

hum…so Search Engine Optimization is “various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings“…but hey…I do believe I’ve heard those exact words used before by some search engine engineers, and I think I’ve read those exact words before in some patents.

I wish there were a “Rank Deserve Number” next to the urls in a search result page … This site deserves to be at this number..but the seo practices on the site are making it rank where you see it……. hey, you’re #3…but you only deserve to be #23….red flag!… hey, you’re #23, and you should be #3…better do more SEO!……or you deserve to be #11, and you are #11… so keep your SEO to that level….

So what if I were talking to my neighbor about his website, and after running some searches, I thought that he was ranking way below where I felt he deserved to be..

So what if I told my neighbor these 3 simple SEO tips…

1. Normally, If  you mention your targeted phrases a few times on a page (as opposed to just once, or not at all) you will rank higher for those phrases.

2. Normally, If you put your targeted phrases in your title tags you will rank higher for those phrases.

3. Normally, if you get other websites to link to your site, you will rank higher.

These are surely SEO technique to achieve higher rankings…now, if my neighbor took the above advice, and he went up in the rankings…did he  deserve that increase? What if he did this every day, all day, 40 hours a week for every week of the year… would he deserve that increase in rankings? What if he then started participating in blogs and forums of related sites, perhaps for the purpose of getting links,  by making blog comments that got links to his site?…. what if that increases his rankings, did he deserve that?…what if he was participating in blog comments and forums just for fun…and wasn’t thinking about the link juice… does he deserve ranking increases for things he did w/o knowing it would increase his rankings…what if he was having fun and maybe only thinking about link juice a little?

Do you only deserve an increase in rankings if you did things without link juice in mind? What if you thought about the link juice just a little bit? What if some PR guy comes up with an idea, and in the background their in house SEO/marketing guy is yelling  “Yes Yes” because he knows it could bring links?

See,there’s the kicker…Bob Jones from some PR department can make a decision like,  “Lets give away phones to people.”…or something like that…and if that gets them lots of links..hey, they weren’t thinking of link juice… but if it were Jim Boykin giving away phones or hot fudge..well,  you know….anyways…that’s another post….

I believe that there are many who do believe that Search Engine Optimization is just “various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings” …but doesn’t every site owner feel they deserve higher rankings?…and how can we know just what we deserve? And how much SEO do we do to only obtain “what we deserve”?

Pagerank sculpting is based on the formula from the original Pagerank patent from 1998, (PDF) that says the value of a backlinks is found via dividing the number of links on page by the value of a page (with a slight dampening factor).

The public news of Google passing value a different way than this old formula on internal links can be found from the Aimclearblog coverage of Danny’s Q and A with Matt at SMX:

Matt: If you have 10 links and 5 are nofollow, there is this assumption that the other 5 get page rank. That might have been partially true at one time, but that’s less effective these days. You’re not going to get a penalty, or get in trouble, there’s better uses of your time. If your using Nofollow to channel page rank around your site, it’s like a band aid, focus on designing your site  purposely to sculpt Pagerank.

…Initially if you had 10 links, and 5 were no followed, the other 5 would get the remaining page rank, it’s not that way these days. It bubbled up from the indexing team and  it could change in the future.

….Q: So there’s 10 links on home page, 5 pages Nofollowed, where is that link juice going?

Matt: You can think of it as evaporating.

Q: It’s actually hurting your site then?

Matt: Use it sparingly, use it for links you can’t vouch for, if you are a power user and there’s a page you don’t want (sign-in) that’s a fine page to use Nofollow on. The only thing I Nofollow on my blog is a subscribe link, which is not all that useful for the main web index.

Q: If there’s a Nofollow page from that main page, there’s evaporation?

Danny: When page rank came out, 10 links on the page each got 1/1oth of the link juice.

Matt: Page rank has changed over the years, academic papers on this are fantastic. Our models and the way we compute it and the way we determine is more sophisticated than when the original papers came out.

I for one am not surprised that a formula dating back to Google’s first patent in 1998 is defunct… pagerank, as outlined in 1998, is dead…has been dead…sculpting something based on that forumula is dead…. the only thing that’s not dead about that forumula, is the visiable toolbar they show people  (and only SEO’s tend to look at that green bar).

I think the nofollow just got outta hand where people started nofollowing pages a bit differently than how google envisioned they’d be used for (first for “helping reduce blog spam”…then for paid links…then SEO’s started to use it for “Pagerank Sculpting”) …and Matt now comes in and basically says “stop wasting your time…. we don’t pass value the old ways anymore.”

……..

ok…so let’s play a Jim Quiz Game here….You’ve got 3 urls to choose from here.. and I can give you backlinks on only 2 of these 3 urls … which 2 pages would you like a link from?

Page A: (FAKE URL) http://www.bobs-blog.com/water-pressure-whoknew.html
Pagerank 5
Number of links on that page: 10 internal, and 10 going to other sites. These 10 sites are “low to so-so” on the Trust Scale.
Backlinks to that page:  100 internal links….. no links to that page from any other site.

Page B: (FAKE URL) http://www.nasa.gov/science/Science-of-water-pressure/resources.html (FAKE URL)
Pagerank 1
Number of links on the page = 100 – most of these links are to high trusted sites
Backlinks to that page ~15
(5 other nasa.gov pages, another .gov link, 2 edu’s, few others…those pages  show either 0 pagerank, or pagerank 1’s. )

Pager C: (FAKE URL)  http://library.harvard.edu/science/water/water-pressure-facts.html
Pagerank 0 – but has google cache
Number of links on the page = 100 – most of these links are to high trusted sites.
Backlinks to page 3 (2 other internal edu pages, and a dot com…none have pagerank, but all 3 are cached)

If you could only get links from 2 of the above sites, which ones would you take?

…..if it were me…..I’d take choice B and C over choice A.

Choice A would be the obvious choice using the traditional logic of (PDF) the original pagerank patent from 1998 (higher pagerank, and more value going to your link since there’s only 10 other links on that page)… but is that green bar the real value of the page?  (by value I mean Ranking Value)…and how is Ranking Value passed out on a page?…and Matt’s words echo in my head

Page rank has changed over the years, academic papers on this are fantastic. Our models and the way we compute it and the way we determine is more sophisticated than when the original papers came out.

So what do I theorize that Google uses for it’s model of finding the value, and passing of value in links is these days?

I believe that Trust plays a big role in Google’s model. I’m a believer in Trust Value, or what some call TrustRank (here’s a great video of Rand explaining TrustRank) (and even though TrustRank isn’t Google’s patent, I do believe Google is using many of those basic ideas).

In the TrustRank Paper(PDF) they talk about Humans identifying 200 sites (or parts of websites (for example, one of the 200 sites might be the library section of stanford.edu)) that are truly pages that link to lots of other sites, and are highly trusted links (pages that haven’t been manipulated by SEO’s). The more closely linked you are to the original trusted sources, the higher your trust score is going to be.

….but many people still look at manipulating pagerank… when I don’t believe that pagerank (based on the original formulas) is the ranking answer any more… I put much more faith in Trust Value than I do in Toolbar Pagerank… problem is, you can’t see Trust Value in a toolbar…  you can only see Pagerank 1998 in the Toolbar.

What if there were instead of a Pagerank bar, a Google Trust Value Bar… and let’s say that every page on http://library.stanford.edu is a TrustRank 10, and everything they link to is a TrustRank 9, and everything they link to is a TrustRank 8…..and if we could see that Trust Value flow…. then everyone would be running around saying, Damn… I need some high trust value links… where can I get some phat links from sites like k12’s or gov’s or edu’s…. but it’s good of google to keep those types of pages a low pagerank, so the brokers won’t come in and ruin the trust of those pages.

That’s partly how I think of it… a page may be a PageRank of 1 and it might have 100 backlinks on it, but it may be a Trust Value of 9, and every link might get the same trust level… no matter if there’s 2 links on that page or 200 links on that page.

…And since they’re no Trust Value Bar, I’ll use my ninja senses to value the trust of a page and a site when evaluating the value of obtaining a link…but I won’t get distracted by the Pagerank, nor the number of links on the page.

In this case we’re pretty lucky…in that the site that’s beating the clients is Yahoo Answers, and Yahoo has a “report abuse” button on on those pages… so the client will start filling out abuse forms…

but normally… do I mind if other site steal my/or clients website content?…we’ll, so long a Google always knows who had the original content, and that ranks first…then I have no problem with people stealing my content…especially if I can get them to steal a link too… will the link have any value?.. probably 97% won’t have any value… but if 3% do, and if I didn’t pay for them..I’ll certainly take em.

With this client we talked about those possible solutions…including adding link(s) in the text of the pages going to other internal page(s), and making an image a link as well (some are taking the pictures with the text), in the hopes that people copying it, will grab the link(s) too. We could also add an rss feed with a link in that too… but not sure how relevant putting an rss feed on these pages would be….

There’s also this code which can assist with image “borrowers”. (Thanks Wiep)

On the other hand…if the client were sure that they didn’t want anyone copying their content, then here’s some resources to help slow down the copying.

• No Right Click for images & No Right Click for source.
• LOTS of code for disabling copying.
• Make your site AJAX

but again, perhaps it’s best if we don’t stop people from copying… here’s a  Case against disabling right mouse click.

The above may be good for most cases of websites taking your content (don’t worry, or try to get them to link…or fight)….but I’m disturbed that a big site like Yahoo can beat my client in rankings by hosting that content….luckily, in this case, Yahoo answers has a “report abuse” which I believe will solve those issues…but if some other site were hosting pages with our clients copyrighted content, and those other sites ranked higher than the client, then we’d have a real problem… to fix this on our own we’d have to get a lot of sites to link to the clients pages that others have copied, then we might be able to switch those results around so that google realizes these pages are more important than the copied pages …but are other ways beyond using the might of the link sword…

• Report To Google and Infringement Notice:
  
• Sample Cease and Desist Order
• A few years ago I talked about Internet Copyright Law:  A Rat Pilfered My Web Site Cheese – What Do I Do?And of course, just to be fair and present the other side of the story … Here’s a post from an opponent of “Disable Right click” School of Thought:

3 years ago when I last talked about content stealers I also got some great feedback…including:

Graywolf said: Filing a copyright is really easy and you don’t need a lawyer. It’s one form 2 pages and $30, it’s really pretty simple, even I’ve done it http://www.copyright.gov/register/literary.html For the stuff that I really care about I lump it all together into one big document, (from more than one website) and register the whole thing.Takes longer to merge the  copy than to fill out the forms. $30 a year never had to go after anybody, but pretty cheap for some piece of mind.

Greg Said: preface this with – i am not a lawyer. however, i have been down this path more than once, so i am fairly well versed. copyrighting is such an easy thing to do – cheap and quick. if you apply for your copyright quickly enough (i think within the first 30 days of publishing) then you can sue for legal fees as well.also, you don’t have to actually have the copyright to sue – you simply need to have applied for one. with an hour and $30 you at least have some form of defense – as long as the perpetrator doesn’t live outside of the US.
—————

So WBP Blog reader… What resources have you used? Do you feel it’s best to stop people from copying… or best to try to get them to give a link if they are going to copy.. if so, what methods do you use to get them to link to you?

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I’m Feeling Lucky

They gave us 3 phrases that they wanted us to analyze the top 10 sites for. The goal being so that their and our teams would know why these sites where ranked on the first page and to see what we can learn from these competitors so that we can rank on the first page too.

Wouldn’t ya know it… the phrases they gave me were “cheap widgets”, “discount widgets”, and “buy widgets” (not really widgets…but the cheap, discount and buy were real).

Simple enough…. well, until you see that 98% of the top 100 sites for those phrases are buying links to their website with these phrases (cheap widgets, etc) as the link text…

Natural link text like “cheap widgets”  don’t happen much in the real world… and since it doesn’t happen much in the real world, it doesn’t take much… say like 1 link with that exact link text of “cheap widgets”…to instantly beat all the sites that don’t buy links.  Now, if you’re in a market where over 100 people are buying links.. then he who buys the “best” links, with that exact anchor text, w/o getting “caught” is going to win that game….for as long as he doesn’t get caught.

And this client and their in house SEO doen’t want to get spanked by Google.  Their in-house SEO used to work for another SEO company which worked with a Ticket site…and last year many of the ticket selling sites got spanked..and she doesn’t want that to happen at this company.

So buying links isn’t an option for them or for me.

So what can we do… we’ll… let’s look at the top 10 sites to see what we can learn from them…

hum…. 7 out of the top 10 don’t even have the word “cheap” on the page at all …this phrase only appear in links pointing to this page…hehe… and the average length of non-link text on these pages is 57 words…hehe… ok.. so should we do what the top 10 sites are doing… let’s not mention the phases, and don’t worry about content… just think about users… not the search engines… nope… I have to say..ok..here’s what the top 10 sites are doing.. but we’re not going to do that.. we’re going to put 500+ words on your homepage to get all the longtail we can off the homepage… we’re going to start writing content on product pages… where they don’t really need content… but god bless food for the search engines…..yea… that’s not what the top 10 sites are doing… because they’re buying links… but it’s what we have to do to compete with them.

The top 10 sites are all taking a risk by buying links… so, to compete, we make our clients buy content.. we give them all sorts of content.. content for homepages, content for product pages, content for common questions in the industry, content to help get links, etc, etc…. wonder if google will ban sites for buying content one day… hey… you didn’t write that content, you Bought It! You Bloody Bastard! ….I can see bots crawling the web with spam filters looking for words like “guest post” or “written by X” where X has to equal the site author…

opps….got off on a tangent there…where was I…oh, so can a non-link buyer compete for “cheap widgets”?… somewhat…Sure, we can optimize for those phrases 100% on the site…and that will help… but then there’s only so much value…once you’ve done your on page optimization …it’s done (though creating new content never ends).. now it’s down to backlinks… and if lots of other sites are buying that exact link text links, its going to make your dreams of getting into the top 10 a lot harder.

My end advice… don’t worry about these phrases or those sites… yes, they taught us we can utilize our site much better than they can.  Keep writing (or having content written) for the site.. keep adding quality pages, and keep doing the things that are attracting natural permanent trust backlinks.  Look at your website traffic, watch it increase over time as you keep doing this.

So do tell me We Build Pages Blog Reader…. If you’re targeting Rankings…

Do you prefer Fast and High Rankings for competitive phrases…with a risk….

or do you want slow and steady…keep writing…keep getting non-paid links…build up your trust methods of getting links?

What is your risk tolerance?

FYI… I can understand both sides of the coin here… don’t think I don’t… I’m Jim Boykin…not some white hat you may have seen on here before….and I’ve done almost everything when it comes to link building…and how I built links yesterday is not how I build them today…and how I build them today, will not be how I’ll be building them next year…it evolves…sometimes slowly, and sometimes faster..but I’ll probably be building links until the day I die…or until links don’t have a huge factor in rankings (which I don’t see coming any time soon).

I’ll tell ya what, since you’re here, I’ll start with a little off topic fun quiz for you. The homepage of Google has 28 links on it. 1 of those links goes to another site… can you name the other site?
(for the answer, click on the “more” drop down that has the hidden links in it).

Ok..where were we..the CEO Post…The types of link building with pros and cons… and of course, the last choice is the We Build Pages choice …..

For most websites that we work with, the vast majority of the traffic to their sites comes from 1 source – Google… heck, for the non-blogging world in the USA, I’m guessing Google referral of traffic is the biggest source of traffic for 95% of all websites. (*jim’s guess).

So if one is seeking to increase traffic, one can look at other methods (beyond search engines) of bringing traffic to the site (branding, social media, tools, widgets, etc).

Or they can seek to increase their positions, or add additional keyword positions to that source of the biggest existing traffic generator (Google).

Often, our clients have decided that the best ROI (based on relevant traffic), comes from increasing the existing traffic from Google.

So if you’re biggest goal for traffic is Google, then you need to decide where to put your focus to increase your rankings in Google.

Since Backlinks are still the most important aspect analyzed by Googlee in regards to rankings, then increasing backlinks should be the biggest priority when seeking to increase your Google rankings.

Ok… so if you know you need backlinks. and that’s your priority, here are some choices you may be faced with….

Popular Choice #1 – Buy links.

Pro’s, nothing can compete with focused link text going to specific targeted pages. This method rules to this very day.

Con’s, Google can penalize you for buying links if your caught.

Popular Choice #2 – Have the inhouse guy get them. They’ll comment on blogs and link the name to your site… they may get some wiki pages, and/or get some profile pages, they’re participate in forums for links, they’ll submit to directories, and maybe even some type of trading or 3 ways, etc…

Pro’s I do think that often about 10% of this does work…and if you do tons of this, on a continual basis, and don’t map too many known networks, it can achieve some great rankings on and off depending on google’s algorthym at any given time (higher flux rate from what what I’ve observed).

Con’s - 90% of these don’t pass trust value. Google can detect pages where “outsiders” can add a link (blog comments, forums, wiki’s, profile pages, etc…and I believe that they tend not to pass full trust value on these types of pages.)

Popular Choice #3 – Social Media for the purpose of links
I’ll say right off the start, doing social media for the purpose of building backlinks is something that’s almost always doomed to fail right from the start. Social media can deliver usually just a a few links of value, but more often than not, the value in social media is in more in “branding” rather than “link building”. If you’re purpose is link building for higher search engine rankings, don’t make the mistake of thinking that social media is an end to the means of getting quality backlinks.

Choice #4 – We Build Pages Link Building Services

We have a tool that helps to tell us what specific content that we can write for our clients, that has a high probability of obtaining backlinks. We write the content, and then we contact those we feel could benefit by linking to this content. Our links are non-paid, human reviewed, and permanent. The sites we contact are of the highest trusted value in our eyes. We don’t contact bloggers, we contact old trusted websites to get links like edu’s, k12’s, and all schools, .org’s, .gov’s and sites like these.

Pro’s - non-paid, human reviewed, permanent, greatly increases a site’s trust value.

Con - the only con is that it’s often not a link going to the targeted page with the targeted text, their links going to related resource pages…. but then again, the only arternatives to guarantee exact link text to exact pages tends to ge by paying someone to do that…which again, runs the risk of a penalty.

We’re currently running a killer link building sale right now… we’re offering our $2500/month link building service for only $1000 for the first month. Plus you get a $1000 report for free, as well as in introductory phone call where a few ninjas and I review the report with you, as well as we have another call with you after the first month to review the work with you. You also have reports that are updated monthly showing the work and the links that we’ve been able to get for you. This deal also has a money back guarantee if you don’t like the work or the links we produced for you.

So for $1000 the first month you get $2500 worth of link building (10 permanent links), a free $1000 report, and 2 phone calls with me and some ninjas here…. and if you’re not happy with the first month of work you can have your $1000 back. If you are happy with the work, you’re moved to the $2500 monthly budget level from that point on.

What types of links are we getting?
We’ll here’s some analysis:
28% are edu’s and/or colleges
22% are .org’s
8% are k12’s
1% are gov’s

What these links do:

They increase the trust in your site, that in-turn seems to be moving everything up as far as rankings go… but the movement is easier to see on the longer tail phrases.

What these links probably won’t do:

Move you from #2 to #1 for “competitive phrases” where there are lots of link buyers buying links with that exact phrase as anchor text. But again, Link buying carries a bigger risk.

Are the links like what we’re getting the kind of links you wish you were getting?

Fill out this form, and Chuck will contact you about how we can work with you.

What type of link building do you do, and how does it work for you in targeting the short tail and the long tail?

I thought I’d start with a song… why… cause I was singing this in my head on my way home from work this past friday… so why not let everyone else enjoy… yes, we will get more serious in the future.. and sometimes less serious… but it’s me… I hope you enjoy.

Sympathy for the SERP Chaser – done to Sympathy for the Devil

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of content and links
I’ve been around for over 10 years
Getting every link that’s within my faith

And I was round when Yahoo and MSN
Were the Titans of the early search days
Made damn sure had Keyword-rich-urls
Because Yahoo loved them so much back then.

Pleased to meet you
Link Ninja Jim is my Name.
but what’s puzzling you
Is the color of my link game.

I stuck around for the Florida Dance
And I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Brokers and the PageRanks Links
and came up with other linking techniques

I’d link deep
with good text to keep
To keep the SERPS changing
to make the sites take a leap.

pleased to meet you
Link Ninja is still my name, of yeah
Ah, what’s puzzling you
Is the color of my game, oh yeah

And I watch with glee
while you SEOs and SMM’s
do your social media chatting
On the profiles you made
I shouted out
What about the rankings?
When after all
it’s about trust and link text!

Let me please introduce myself
My company offers content and links
and I’m and SEO and a Link Ninja
But in rankings is where I put my faith

Pleased to meet you
Link Ninja is still my name, oh yeah
But what puzzling you
Is the color of my game, oh yeah
But what’s confusing you
Is the color of my game
Just as every Spam Engineer is an SEO
And all the Black hats are white
As Heads is Tails
Just call me SERP Chaser
Cause I’m in need of some SERP Placement

So if you meet me
I hope you’ll have something nice to say

Because we all want rankings.
for the sites we work for.

Pleased to meet you
Can you guess, I’m a link ninja just the same, um yeah
But what’s puzzling you
Is the color of my game, um mean it, get down.
Woo, Who
Oh yeah, Link it down
Oh Yeah
Oh Yeah!
Link me baby, what’s my ninja name
Link it Honey, guess my ninja name……

—————————————————————–

Ah… did I mention that we also updated webuildpages.com last week?

It feels good to be back,

I’m Feeling Lucky Today!

Jim

Public Domain Images

You really can’t get much better than images in the public domain. No attribution is needed. You can modify them and use them commercially. How can you find public domain images to use?

1. Wikipedia is your friend. While I don’t often advocate using Wikipedia as a source for anything, they provide a great listing of public domain image resources, and they list them by category.  Categories include history, art, books, logos and flags, postage stamps, culture, and more.
2. Try the US Government. There are a lot of great .gov images in the public domain.  The government even made a list of the best copyright-free image libraries they offer.
3. Good ol’ DMOZ. Why not check the open directory for some free images? DMOZ categories have human editors, so you can trust that each link does what it says on the box. Check out their listing of clip art in the public domain.

Creative Commons Images

Because not everything you need is going to be available in the public domain, Creative Commons is the next best thing. These images were often created by people like us who want to share their work as long as they get credit for it. If you use any images with the Creative Common license, make sure you follow the artist’s wishes for proper attribution! There are a lot of great Creative Commons resources out there:

1. Flickr. There are so many images out there on Flickr!  For our purposes, we use the Flickr Advanced search. The Smackdown post has a great screen capture (have to scroll down) of the Creative Commons section of the search page. Since we don’t generally need to modify or build upon the images we find, we only need to check the Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content and Find content to use commercially options, but I can’t currently create my own screencap to portray this. Maybe I can edit later.
2. Google it. You can’t just do a Google image search for this; most of the images you find from a normal image search will return images with uncertain usage rights.  But one user created their own Custom Search engine called the Connected Classroom Creative Commons Image Search, which searches 14 sites for Creative Commons images.
3. Bad Neighborhood. The Creative Commons Google Image Search Assistant is a great meta search tool that can save you a lot of legwork by crawling multiple image resources to find only images that can be both modified and used commercially.

Free Stock Images

And of course, there are sites out there that offer free stock photos with their own rules for usage. Some require attribution, while others do not. Some require artist notification… Be sure to read the guidelines for each site to make sure you’re following the rules!

1. Stock Exchange. This is one of my personal favorites. You’ll get to know the Stock Exchange URL (sxc.hu) quite well. They do list “premium” results at the top of each search page, which require purchase to download, so be sure you’re looking at the free image results. If you don’t see a watermark, you should be fine.
2. MorgueFile. I used this site a lot when I was writing for a popular web content portal. Artists generally ask to be notified when you use their photos, and it doesn’t take long to leave them a comment to let them know where they can see their pics in use.
3. Top Free Photo Site Lists. Everyone has an opinion about the best free stock image sites. See what the following people have to say: SpeckyBoy, DazzlinDonna, HubPages, PhotoshopSupport, Digital Image Magazine, Nooti… You get the idea.
4. Bad Neighborhood. And of course, there’s always the Free Image Meta Search that crawls multiple free image sites to save you the hassle of going to each site yourself. I generally don’t use this unless I hit a wall, because I like to check the sites with the best usage terms for my needs first.

Have I overlooked your favorite source of free images? Let me know.