If you use any custom images, make sure anyone that is using them is linking to you, and linking to you properly.
I know lots of businesses and website owners like to create their own images on their sites. Everything from custom product images to infographics, graphs, and pie charts.
Images of course are a great way to tell a story.
What often happens with these images is they get stolen and used by other sites. When that does happen, you have two choices.
First, you can of course go the legal route forcing them to take the image down. It does not matter if they are already linking to you. If you did not give them permission to use the image, they are infringing on your copyright.
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to dive into this option any further other than to say if you really do not want a site using your images or you want compensation for them using your images without your permission, you should contact your legal counsel about what your options are.
The second option is to reach out to them and tell them that if they are going to use your image, you want them to link back to the page the link is on.
If you want to find anyone that is using your images without permission, you can upload them to Google’s reverse image search.
Apparently, Google thinks I am a lot of fun.
There is another thing you can do with these. People have a misconception that they can use any image they find on the internet and that as long as they link back to where they took it from, it is allowed. They also think that if Google image search labels an image as okay to use, they are in the clear.
What these people will often do is link back directly to the image. If someone is linking directly to your image that is not really providing any SEO benefit to your site. Image files are dead ends for link equity. They have no outbound internal links. You want them to link to the page your image is on instead.
The way you find these opportunities quickly is to download all your links from Semrush and Google Search Console into a spreadsheet. Then search the target URLs by the extensions you use for images on your site: .jpg, .png, etc.
Now contact these website owners telling them they can continue to use your image, but must attribute the image properly by linking to your page that the image appears on and not the image directly.
