Managing a lot of websites, we see all sorts of link building techniques for SEO. Nowadays the vast majority of these are guest posts, either free or paid, then some form of link insertion either for broken links, additional resources or just paid.

Recently we have been inundated with emails adopting a new method (new to us at least) which aims to fraudulentlypersuade website owners to place a link on their website with claims that theyhave broken copyright policy for images used on the site.

The first time we saw this email, we panicked a littletrying to confirm we had acquired the image properly.

Googling this issue didn’t show any other users experiencingit, but we suspect it is happening on a large scale and hopefully, this post willhelp.

USMediaHouse Copyright Email

The email comes through as:

Hi I hope you're the right person for this.,

You are using my client's image (attached below) in oneof your articles [the URL] We're glad that it's of use to you :)

There’s no issue if you've bought this from our marketpartners such as Shutterstock, iStock, Getty Image, Pexels, Adobe, Pixabay,etc.,

However, if you don’t have the proper license for theimage then we request you to provide image credits (clickable link) on yourarticle. Or else this will be against the copyright policy.

Unfortunately, removing the image isn't the solutionsince you have been using our image on your website for a while now.

Feel free to ask any questions that you may have.

Cheers

Emma Smith

Community Head

USMediaHouse

When this email came in, we found it odd that they mentionedPexels and Pixabay both of which are suppliers of free images under thecreative commons licence. When we did a reverse image search we did, in fact,confirm the image was from Pexels, so replied confirming this.

But then it happened again, and we clocked on it was justspam. The second email was also for an image on Pexels/Pixabay. Another emailcame through to one of our clients, and this time it was for an image they weresupplied by the manufacturer as part of a product so impossible that it wasoriginally on Pexels and Pixabay.

Response Email

The client emailed to ask what link they wanted and receiveda reply link back to a blog loosely related to smart home products that ourclients' post was based on. The link was not a photographers profile or a corporationit is just a cheap way to try and acquire links.

The URL the email came from is usmediahouse.com which is adomain that was created on 2019-01-02 and hosts a random mix of news and whatappears to be guest posts. Interestingly they have a domain authority of 57even though there are only 209 linking domains.

Link building via images has been a tried and test techniquefor years, but I would assume this falls well into the Black Hat territory andit will be interesting to see how frequent this form of link building is in thecoming months. It is probably a well-known technique, but if you have been avictim of it, we hope this post has helped.