Sad to see that Flickr has gone the way of Wikipedia and started to apply the rel="nofollow" attribute to outgoing links from image descriptions.

I saw it coming a while ago. More and more Web 2.0 sites are taking counter-measures against marketers who are trying to exploit their PageRank to promote other sites. When you see SEO blogs recommending that you drop links from your Flickr images, you know the party is about to end.

So, do you continue to link to your sites from Flickr descriptions?

Well, there are two schools of thought. One says that Flickr will continue to be popular, so your links may still drive traffic, simply because your images will be found via search engines.

The other school of thought is to stop using Flickr to host your images and self-host them instead. Why add content to a massive social networking site for them to make money from if you can't gain some benefit at the same time? Webmasters are a different ball game to regular service users - they generally expect some return on their investment.

Flickr may be a free service, but it's wildly popular, and a lot of the value from the site comes from the contributors creativity and photographic skill. If I was a power user of Flickr and was using the service to market my sites/photography, I'd be a little peeved that the rug had been pulled from under my feet.

Anyway, your other option at this stage is to self-host your images. Why not? Google Images will find you anyway and you'll get organic search referrals one way or another. Host your own images and people will link back to you instead of Flickr. Who needs the link juice more, you or Yahoo?