SEO blogger predicts that Infographics will be targeted for spam

[Michael Martinez]

I know I just asked if any gambling affiliates are using infographics for links but this article from Jennifer Slegg caught my attention yesterday, and I just remembered it.

In Infographics & their huge Google spam footprint she writes:

Images are already indexed in Google in the image search – along with the image size – so it wouldn’t be a stretch for Google to add some sort of penalty (or not so much penalty, but maybe a signal to discount links) for landing pages where an image length is longer than 1500 and wider than say 500 or 800 pixels, because that is an image size not used often for anything but infographics. While not all infographics are the long and skinny, a fair amount of them are. And I am willing to bet when you oh-so-conveniently included the copy and paste code for your infographic that you failed to include a no-follow tag (of the dozen or so I checked, none included the no-follow attribute in the code, which Google would argue that all webmasters should do when they are unsure of the quality, or legitimacy, of an incoming link.

Personally, I only have two problems with infographics: they are way too big and you cannot cut and paste any of their data points and include them in references.

As far as I am concerned inforgraphics are terrible content, but they seem to generate a lot of links.

So, yeah, I'm inclined to agree with her: infographics may be targeted for spam sooner or later.

So how would you do this and still hope to avoid being hit by a spam filter in the future?

[Randy]

1- I would create smaller infographics rather than larger infographics.
2- I would minimize the number of infographics I used for linkbuilding on a site.
3- I would avoid using the word "infographic" in any of the code for the site or the image.
4- I would add plenty of real text to the page on my site with the infographic, either before or after the image, or both.

Other than those, I don't have a lot to offer in terms of a strategy that would avoid an algorithmic discount of some kind.