The world of SEO is getting bigger every day thanks to the aggressive push of social search. Yahoo is leading the pack with all of their newly acquired companies who pioneered the new wave of social search. Primary among these web sites is Flickr. This is a shared photo site, where users can post their photos, tag them for easy search and allow other member of the Flickr community to rate and discuss the photos.

This all seems like a nice idea for photo buffs. However, now that Yahoo owns the site, there is a significant SEO benefit to be had; maybe. If you search on a term such as travel photography, above the organic results, you may see 3 photos which come from Flickr. These photos then link to Flickr and of course a potential web site from the photographer or creative owner. For example, a photo might lead to a beach resort. This obviously could become a good source for new inbound links and even highly ranked sites with their photos, if properly tagged and voted on by enough of the Flickr community.

So what’s the rub? Well, you must be logged into some Yahoo service to see these photos. If you are not, then you only see the text links. This is the same for Yahoo Answers, a Q & A site owned by Yahoo.

What this means to me, is that Yahoo is going to benefit from sites like, myweb, Flickr, Yahoo Answers and Trip Planner. However, since the Googlebot and MSNbot are not members of any Yahoo product, they will never see those links, and as such, even if the links make it into the Yahoo directory, the SEO benefit will be limited to Yahoo results only.