Learn how to use images to gain backlinks to your website by finding and asking people to properly attribute your images.
Images are a great way to draw attention to your website and content. But if you have custom illustrations or infographics on your site, it’s highly likely that others will use them in their content. Most of the time, people link back to the source of the image when using your images, but not always. They sometime also only link to the image instead of the page it came from. Neither of these situations is ideal. If you spot people doing this, it’s worth reaching out and kindly asking them to add or fix the source link. But how do you find people using your images without proper attribution in the first place? One way is to right-click on an image on your site, then hit “Search Google for Image”. Check the results to see if they’ve linked back to you. If not, reach out. Another way to find instances where people link to the image files instead of pages is to paste your website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, go to the Backlinks report, then search for links with .png or .jpg in the backlink URLs. This will help you find any backlinks that are pointing to the image file instead of the page it came from. Using these two methods, you can find people using your images and ask them to properly attribute them. This will help you gain backlinks to your website, which can help improve your SEO and website traffic.
