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Ask HN: Does Google hash images and penalize sites for relying on stock photos?

7 points by paulcole ↗ HN
I noticed today that only rarely do "stock" images show up as part of the featured snippet. Made me wonder if Google is hashing stock images and penalizing sites who use it?

Any thoughts on this SEO conspiracy theory?

3 comments

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techjuice
Maybe they are, if so that is good as it encourages original work. Remember the search engine is setup to give the best results for humans so giving humans original content will always be ranked higher than non-original content (text, images, videos, etc.).
jenthoven
I worked on Google Image Search, and my team was responsible for image quality across all of Search. There are some checks on image similarity, although “de-duplication” is applied in smart ways for different queries. To my knowledge, there isn’t an algorithm that tries to pick “non-stock” images.

In general, Google/page rank favors sites that other people have favored (by linking to and talking about on the internet). It seems that original content is generally more “link-worthy” than copied content, so that might explain your observation.