Dreamstime is committed to using ethical practices in all of our business endeavors, and this includes SEO. There are two primary components to SEO: On-Site SEO, which means making the website easy for search engines to crawl and index, and Off-Site SEO, which involves establishing Dreamstime as an authority in the stock photo industry around the web. This is achieved through publishing great content across the web in the form of press releases and industry related articles, and further facilitated by providing quality content on the Dreamstime website that people want to link to.
We would like for you to provide a direct link to the Dreamstime home page. This is not mandatory, but would be greatly appreciated and would help out everyone.
Referral Links VS SEO Links
The referral program does a great job of driving quality, targeted traffic to Dreamstime and is also a large source of links to us. However, the drawback of links from referral websites, from an SEO perspective, is that they aren’t direct links. They have referral IDs attached to them, which ensure that referred traffic is tracked accurately for commissions. This makes them very valuable as referral links, but not as valuable as SEO “backlinks” because the added referral IDs cause some confusion for search engines.
We want to make our business work to its maximum potential for both our referral program participants and us, so changes in your referral links are not at all what we are suggesting. You need your referral IDs in place to make money! But what you can do in addition to promoting Dreamstime with your referral links is to also provide a “direct” link to the Dreamstime home page. For example, a typical link containing a referral ID to the home page looks like this:
http://www.dreamstime.com/res123456-free-image
Whereas a direct, SEO-friendly backlink simply looks like this:
http://www.dreamstime.com
How Does This Affect Me?
Please be aware, this is NOT a requirement. We understand that you do not want to jeopardize your referral earnings by linking without your referral ID so you may place this link anywhere you are comfortable, and it doesn’t even have to be on your primary website. It can be on any website, blog, or social media page that you manage.
We’d love to compensate you for this link, but that would not be practicing ethical SEO. An honest SEO backlink cannot be paid for, which is why this is not mandatory. Only add this link if you genuinely believe in our services and images and deem us worthy of your friends, family, and clients’ trust.
We do this also. In an effort to help our community we provide opportunities within our forums, user blogs, and contributor profile pages for people to get direct links to their websites from Dreamstime. In this way we all mutually benefit from direct links and support the industry as a whole.
So how can you help? Linking to us is easy! Simply copy the HTML snippet below and paste it wherever you’d like your link to be:
