A question for the SEOers...

[Pot Bellied Fool]

An interesting little question has cropped up from an aquaintance of mine. My business is SEO but it left me going "ahhh... Hmm - let me think..." So I'm curious as to what others think and I know we have a lot of web-savvy folk on here.

[Disclaimer: I'm not being paid for this advice, but I think it's an interesting question]

A photographer has a nice little website. Does good work. 700+ backlinks from 120ish domains. Not bad for a site that he's curated himself. Good on-page etc yada..yada...

But a couple of years ago, a national newspaper pinched one of his photos (shock, horror!). By way of settlement, he requested credit AND a link back to his site. And then got busy doing other stuff.

But in spite of a couple of reminders ("Oh yes, we'll do it") he never got the backlink.

They've used it a couple of times more on their site since so he's a bit miffed. He now has a solicitor on the case, the copyright infringement is clear but the solicitor has asked him to value the loss of this link over the last few years.

In SEO terms, a link from an authority site (DA98) is worth having (in spite of Google saying it's not all about backlinks anymore. Content is King I agree but a link like this is gold dust to a small biz in both SEO & direct traffic) - but how the hell to try & quantify that loss for a solicitor?

Any ideas?

I think it's an interesting question, be interested to see what debate ensues

[andycambo]

Difficult to say since not very know how the search engines work 100% but that type of link would have made a difference in their rankings.

The link, from the newspaper, could have created a number of leads but I don't think it would be possible to guess how many.

If you just stick to search engines then you could look at his current 'visit to client' conversion rate.

Let's say they has a 1% conversion rate from 100 visits per month that find them using the phrase 'photographer [local]' and makes £1000. Using Google you find that this phrase is searched for ~1000 per month and with the influence of the link (making him no.1 for this term) you could guess that they would have increased his visits for this keyword to 700 (70% of the total searches I don't think is unreasonable for being number 1). Keeping the current conversion rate this means they would have made £7000 so therefore they have a loss of £6000 per month.

The above is trying to keep things basic but ultimately I don't think it's possible to really calculate an actual amount because there are so many keywords / phrases that would have been influenced by the link.

What's your taking on it?

[rpguk]

Couldn't it be quantified by looking at the cost of buying a link on one of the link exchanges?

[951TSE]

Another way to look at it would be how much would the photographer have got paid if he'd not asked for a link. There are several examples within the first few entries on this webpage:

http://www.londonfreelance.org/rates/photonew.html

After all there's no guarantee that any link would produce any click throughs at all.

ETA - His credit would probably be on page 27 right at the bottom of the page in the smallest possible space.

[maffski]

Another another way to look at it is as an advert, running for two years on the website of a national newspaper - I bet their sales department would be happy to supply you with their rate card. That is effectively what was paid for by letting them use the image and would be easier to quantify.

In fact a bunch of rate cards are online, for example this PDF from the Guardian. Their cheapest standard ad is listed as £30 per 1000 page views.

[AnimalMother]

Pot Bellied Fool said:

An interesting little question has cropped up from an aquaintance of mine. My business is SEO but it left me going "ahhh... Hmm - let me think..." So I'm curious as to what others think and I know we have a lot of web-savvy folk on here.

[Disclaimer: I'm not being paid for this advice, but I think it's an interesting question]

A photographer has a nice little website. Does good work. 700+ backlinks from 120ish domains. Not bad for a site that he's curated himself. Good on-page etc yada..yada...

But a couple of years ago, a national newspaper pinched one of his photos (shock, horror!). By way of settlement, he requested credit AND a link back to his site. And then got busy doing other stuff.

But in spite of a couple of reminders ("Oh yes, we'll do it") he never got the backlink.

They've used it a couple of times more on their site since so he's a bit miffed. He now has a solicitor on the case, the copyright infringement is clear but the solicitor has asked him to value the loss of this link over the last few years.

In SEO terms, a link from an authority site (DA98) is worth having (in spite of Google saying it's not all about backlinks anymore. Content is King I agree but a link like this is gold dust to a small biz in both SEO & direct traffic) - but how the hell to try & quantify that loss for a solicitor?

Any ideas?

I think it's an interesting question, be interested to see what debate ensues

The only way to measure, that will be acceptable to a solicitor/court is price quotes for similar. He needs to get quotes from other newspaper sites for text back links.

But I dont think he will get anywhere trying to get back lost earnings from not having that link, only the value of the link perhaps. The court may not even be interested in that and will probably only be interested in the initial problem, whats the usual rate for a picture being used in a paper?

[Pot Bellied Fool]

Thanks all. I like the idea about approaching it from the angle of what an advert would've cost - hadn't thought of that one.

I agree that trying to get a Natioanl newspaper to stump up big bucks is probably not going to happen but the harder he can go in, the more room for negotiation there is. After all, the copyright breach was pretty flagrant.

Cheers.

[budfox]

I'd just ask for a grand to settle the thing.