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How To Use Google Advanced Image Search To Build Backlinks

by 

Jennifer Caughey

Last updated: August 15th, 2014

Did you know that you can use Google Advanced Image Search to build backlinks? It’s a great tool that can be a fantastic asset to your link building efforts. Our quick video tutorial will walk you through the process:

Hi there, I’m Jennifer, a link building specialist from Powered by Search. Today I’m going to show you how to use Google’s advanced image search when building backlinks. I will share some of my cool tips with you and help you to easily create backlinks back to your site. By the end of this video you’ll be an expert with this wonderful tool and you’ll be able to know how to get the links back from the person who stole them.

There are a few things you need to do here. The first thing you need to do is an image search. What this will do is show you all the images that Google has indexed for your search. For this video you’re going to type site:www.toronto.ca. We’re just going to scroll down here and I’m going to click on an image. This gives you a couple of things. It gives you a title for the photo, the website where it was originally published, the size of the image, and here it says search by image. That’s what we want to do. We want to search by image.

What we’re looking for is we want to see whether or not your images have been published anywhere else on the web without your permission, and if it’s been republished, I can assure you that Google has indexed it here. If we just scroll down here we can see that this site here, citywide.com, has used this photo a few times. We’re just going to click here.

Here we are. Here’s the photo. You can see right here that the site has given attribution for the photo to globalnews.ca. This is not where the original photo was published. It was published at toronto.ca. If toronta.ca was my site, I could get in contact with the webmaster to request they add attribution to this photo.

But, what we really don’t want to do is waste any time with spam sites. We want to contact sites that may respond and may be willing to grant our requests. You want to look for high quality and high curated sites. Then, ask yourself if you want to get a backlink from that site.

What we’ll want to do here is look on the site and try to find emails, or links to social media accounts, or feedback or comment forms. We can see up here in the right hand corner there’s a contact us form. This is how we’ll get in touch with the webmaster. Here’s our message box. This is where we’ll write our message.

In this email that you’re going to write, you want to make sure to provide the webmaster with an acknowledgment that the image was republished by them. You’d also want to tell them the name of the image and the site URL that they republished the image on. Also, make sure to request that they attribute and link to the original source of the image. You would provide them with the original URL where the image was published, and you would provide them with a sample of how you would like the attribute to look as well.

This is one way to use this tool, and this is called reverse image search. This means that they’ve used your image without permission or without attribution. The reverse image search is a very useful method to use, because it can also help you to identify sites that use competitor images.

Another way that this tool can be used is to offer premium images or cinemagraphs to bloggers. This is where you would set up a database, or a library, or a gallery of images that you can offer to bloggers in exchange for links. This usually occurs through embedded codes or manual link attribution.

Not only can Google advanced search be a useful tool to help you find images to use, but it can also serve as a great tool to help you build a few extra backlinks by finding copyright infractions and requesting attributions be added to these images. You should now have a really good understanding of how to use this wonderful tool from Google and how to reclaim what’s yours.

If you’re feeling any nerves about using this method, you can always let the pros at Powered by Search help you by leveraging our link development expertise and booking a free 30 minute consultation. We would encourage you to get in touch with us if you have any doubts about usage rights or how to request attributes to your already existing images.

Please utilize our comments section by posting any questions you may have, and don’t forget to like and share this video with your friends. This is Jennifer from Powered by Search, and I hope you have a brilliant day. Be sure to subscribe for more awesome marketing tips from Powered by Search.

Video transcription by Speechpad.