: Content licence vs SEO Which will boost a search engine optimization campaign: setting your content to creative common licence or copy-write protection of your content? and to what extent to they

@Nimeshi995

A CC BY-SA Attribution-ShareAlike or Similar can help SEO

Using CC can boost SEO but as DisgruntledGoat mentioned its important to know that your page could be marked duplicate if a big site comes along and uses your images before your page is indexed. So if your going to proceed with CC you want your site being indexed as quickly as possible, a big site may get updates within an hour, if your site is on average 5 days then a big site subscribing to your RSS feed could potentially gain SEO for being the master for the image and then you marked as the duplicate. Now you could explore ways of saying... this is closed licensed for X days but again, I don't think they'll stop people since most people just think the whole site is CC and asking them to remove it will do nothing since you're already be marked as the dupe.

Now lets take a look at the license CC BY-SA


Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even
for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their
new creations under the identical terms. This license is often
compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new
works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives
will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia,
and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating
content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.


Now the important thing to take note off is what I put in bold which is they credit you, so using any of your images they must mention it. Now many people are mistaken and believe that this means linking back to the source or they generally don't mind linking back to the source, so this gains you a back link. Those people who don't back link but just mention this can still help SEO under branding, but depends on if your site is using brand, for example someone mentioning your name on the page can help your SEO, if they mention a brand like argos this can help SEO as it creates buzz words and well Google is pretty good at establishing which is the authority site for the search term as well as giving you ranking increases on other terms (highly debatable but ya).

So you can gain backlink's, great hey? well not always

Most people will assume that the more natural back links they have the better, but this isn't always the case, yes natural back links are key but the relevance of them is key. For example if your site is about CARS and you make a generic image such as a question mark then this means it'll likely at some point end up on every genre of site and will not do you any favors since backlinks from sites about PETS can harm your authority never-mind it won't help your rankings... Yes you may see a pagerank increase but these days that means nothing... all about quality links.

Summary

So yes CC can help SEO but as pointed out by DisgruntledGoat it can have a negative effect if your side is not being indexed quickly and people use your images that are indexed quickly, additionally using generic images can dilute your authority so if your site is about CARS only license pictures with CARS and hope they back link from other car sites or mention your brand as I mentioned.

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@Cofer257

Search engine algorithms don't know anything about content licenses, so there is no direct SEO effect (positive or negative).

However, search engines do weed out duplicate content, so when it sees two pages with the same content, one will typically get dropped from search results.

If your content is already indexed in search engines this is not a problem. If the content is new and you license it (even with attribution), a more popular site could post the content and your page could get marked as the duplicate.

So if you feel that a CC license will increase the buzz around your site, go for it.

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