All About Content

Traffic alone can get a photo (back) into Explore.

This photo dropped out of Explore late last year; it reappeared after I submitted it to Photo Friday, which resulted in new traffic, but no new comments or faves. Conventional wisdom has it that views alone are not enough to boost a photo’s Flickr Interestingness — a strong proportion of people viewing a photo need to leave comments or mark the photo as a favorite — but clearly that’s not true.

In September of 2006, the highest position that particular photograph achieved on Flickr’s Explore was #33. Now that it has reappeared, Flickr Scout is telling me that the highest position it has held is #41. I’m tempted to believe this discrepancy has something to do with why nearly all of my photos dropped out of Explore last November. Back when Flickr implemented a major change in the Interestingness algorithm, it seemed to have blacklisted a lot of photos that appeared in too many forced-commenting groups. Maybe the slate has been wiped clean and there’s opportunity to get some of my old photos back into Explore… perhaps I should just submit all of them to Photo Friday!

The only other explanation for this photo’s reappearance is that Flickr is using something like Google’s PageRank to determine that PhotoFriday, a strong third-party site, is linking to the page… and rewarding the photo for it. But it wouldn’t make sense for Flickr to incorporate off-site links into the Flickr algorithm. That can’t be it. It’s got to be the increase in views. Got to be.

BTW: “Photo Friday Spamming” is (until this page gets indexed) a bone fide Googlenope.

For more about Flickr Explore (e.g., how to get into Explore, why you dropped out of Explore), read my other Flickr posts.

Doesn’t it seem like there was a time — somewhere between Mahir (”WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE !!!!!!!!!I KISS YOU !!!!!”) and [anything] on YouTube — when you didn’t get inundated with the same forwarded email from at least half a dozen of your friends telling you about “funniest thing you’ve ever seen”? Probably because that’s when the effects of Bubble 1.0 were really starting to hit home and the dot-commers didn’t have time for such inanity. Not that I have nostalgia for the bad old days of the recession, but …

Inanity abounds again, via content sharing sites like Digg and YouTube, etc. As a marketer, I always wonder, without fail, “how in the world did that become such a hit?” The answer seems to be two-fold. If you want something to spread across the Internet like wild fire, it needs to be 1) ridiculous and 2) photo documented.

What prompts this post? None other than a joke played by a bunch of pranksters at InPhonic, which has become a pretty hot topic in the Blogosphere, as far as these things go. The tale of what happens when you take a half a dozen employees, someone’s precious Jaguar, and 14,000 Post-It notes has been blogged in at least half a dozen languages.

Seriously? This is viral material? I can swear with 100% confidence that this was never intended to be anything more than a practical joke on a particular InPhonic employee. The photos were published to Flickr in the hopes that the joke’s target would find them before he went down to the parking garage — that’s it. Yet this non-story about the prank’s popularity has been on the ABC World News homepage for 3 days, For God’s Sake!

(Note for those who are still keeping score: It would not be an exaggeration to say that being one of the top stories on ABC’s homepage was meaningless in terms of traffic and popularity next to to getting to the homepages of Digg or Boing Boing. New Media definitely wins this round in the ongoing battle of New Media versus Old Media.)

Take-aways:
- do something unique and unrelated to any product or promotion
- the more ridiculous, the better
- take photos and videos!! (and be sure to assign Creative Commons licensing)
- don’t use your own bandwidth, host on a third-party platform
- share!

Oh yeah, and if you enjoy the photos and want to blog about this yourself, be a dear and link back to Scott’s Flickr page in your post.

When Google does an update you’d think the world was coming to an end based on the complaints of webmasters who lost their top 3 positions. And when Flickr changes its Interestingness algorithm (which determines the top 500 photos seen in Explore), the formerly-but-no-longer popular want to know what gives.

Well, three weeks ago, Flickr made a little change to its Interestingness algorithm. (The basics are well explained in this post on Flickr.com). And based on my analytics logs, people are searching for answers and stumbling upon this blog. So I’ll break my usual tradition of not providing answers to explain what happened.

If you’ve had lot of photos drop out of Interestingness, it’s because you participated in comment whoring groups.

A Flickr developer explains:

We’ve made some changes in interestingness algorithm last week to compensate inflation of activity metrics introduced by groups that force users to create comments and/or favorites before they allowed to post photos in the group.

Actually, they did more than “compensate.” They seem to have blackballed all the photos in those groups outright.

So how is a person supposed to get comments on a photo without submitting it to a bunch of groups? Not to worry, says Flickr’s SilentObserver,

Only groups that force people to comment/fave on certain photos with no choice, are affected by latest algorithm changes.

I, of course, participated in the comment whoring regularly, so all of my Explore photos (which wasn’t that many), save one, are out. Oh well. Sometimes it’s not about being popular. A few of the forced-comments groups provide really good feedback, so it’s worth belonging to some of them even if it no longer helps to achieve Interestingness.

And for the seriously obsessed, Bill Slawski, the web’s resident algo patent expert, uncovered some patent applications to help deconstruct the Interestingness methodology.

More about Flickr…
Today I was doing a vanity search and found a this on the fourth page:

I had just seen the Flickr Explore page and my name certainly wasn’t on it. So why would this page come up for a query on my name? Could it be? Did one of my photos make it onto the Explore homepage without my knowing it? Did Googlebot then crawl that page during that fleeting moment before the photo dropped back into obscurity? Yep, according to Google’s cache of the page.

Check it out yo — That’s my photo!

Which also explains the high number of “favorites” the photo got soon after I posted. A ton of people saw the photo highlighted, were predisposed to mark it as a favorite, which played into a self-reinforcing cycle. After the initial high ranking, however, the photo has been dropping down the Interestingness list, where it will soon hang out in obscurity like my other photos, alas.

A fun case study in how Flickr’s Interestingness algorithm works, though. Not to mention the serendipity of Google caching the version with my photo on it, and then my finding it in the SERPs before the cache got overwritten at the next crawl.

What a wonderful thing Google cache is.

Go to Google’s cache of the Explore homepage or directly to the photo — if you have any interest whatsoever in my little self-congratulatory indulgence, that is.

I have a problem with Flickr. Not in the “hey, I have a beef with you” sort of way, but in the “Hi, my name is Melanie and I have an addiction” sort of way. It all started when my boss asked if we could use Flickr to somehow boost our search engine rankings either in natural search or in image search specifically.

To make a long story short, I’ve had only moderate success in figuring out how to use Flickr to promote commercial products (short of engaging in anything spammy), but have gotten really engrossed in the photo sharing site for my own photography.

Flickr has an algorithm for determining “Interestingness,” which in turn determines which photos are shown in their Explore section where visitors are encouraged to browse “some of the most awesome photos on Flickr.”

To be in Explore, a photo needs to be among the Top 500. The top photo gets displayed on the Explore homepage, and some number of them appear on the page of this week’s interesting photos. The rest you’d have to dig through the calendar to find.

Being number one, naturally, is what those of us with competitive natures strive for — it gives you exposure, traffic and kudos from the Flickr community. Unlike ranking second and third in a traditional Google or Yahoo search, there doesn’t seem to be much advantage to trailing behind. Except of course bragging rights. Ahh, bragging rights. And entrance into the mutual admiration societies where everyone pats everyone else on the back for being in the Top 10, Top 50, Top 100, etc.

And I admit, I’m a Flickr algoholic and I want those bragging rights. So in addition to figuring out the Google algorithm, the Google Image algorithm, the Yahoo (ahem) “algorithm” I am now in pursuit of the secret recipe of Flickr’s Interestingness algo.

There are a couple of things I’ve observed.

Factors Determining if Your Photo Gets Into Flickr Explore:

1. Number of people who mark the photo as one of their “favorite”
2. Reputation of the people who mark your photo as one of their favorites (i.e., how popular their own photos are)
3. The rate at which your photo accumulates comments and “favorites”
4. The number of pools to which you’ve submitted the photo (too many can hurt your rankings)
5. Ratio of views to favorites
6. An odd secret sauce recipe that causes rankings to jump around dramatically within the space of several days — dropping out completely only to reappear near the top, and that sort of thing. To be sussed out …

But here I’m only talking about Flickr’s algorithm within its own self-contained world, not what Flickr popularity can do for you as part of an overall SEO strategy.

As for any tricks and tips I might have for image search optimization for actual search engines… I’m not ready to reveal what’s up my sleeve just yet, but I predict social search optimization overall is going to be an interesting niche to watch.

Read more tips and secrets of Flickr Explore/Interestingness.

In the last two weeks, an interesting thing has happened with my vanity searches. A Google search on my name has been pulling image results. This confounds me, as most searches on proper names don’t pull images, for one. For two, why now? Three, why these particular pictures?

When you click on the “image results for melanie phung” link, it takes you to the same set of thumbnails that would have been displayed if you had conducted a Google Image search, and the first three thumbnails are the ones that were displayed on the standard search results page.

Update February 8, 2006:
The images are gone again.