Does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings?
Matt's answer:
MATT CUTTS: Today’s question comes from Vancouver in British Columbia. Greg asks, does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings? Do original photos help you in this regard? Pretty quick Webmaster video today, does using stock photos on your page have a negative effect on your rankings? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no. Do original photos help you? To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t really make a difference whether it’s a stock photo versus an original photo. But you know what, that’s a great suggestion for a future signal that we could look at in terms of search quality. Who knows, maybe original image sites might be higher quality. Whereas sites that just repeat the same stock photos over and over again might not be nearly as high quality. But to the best of my knowledge, we don’t use that directly in our algorithmic web ranking right now.
by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team
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