True… and there are definitely those sites that are trying to skate by on just infographics. It is a great way to get a foothold and attention for a new site, but you have to do a lot more than just popping out infographics to sustain it.

You’re a wonderful sport for putting up with me…I’m definitely one of those wannabe bloggers who loves to write, but isn’t disciplined (or brave) enough to organize and share my my thoughts on a consistent basis.

Re: Links Being Discounted

I completely believe that spammers are really smart and capable of building large social media accounts. And it would make sense if some of the “social signals” are discounted. But, in my experience, I’ve had more success generating social signals w/ graphics that textual content. Perhaps that’s because I’m a horrible writer

But, I think we agree that at the end of the day, as evidenced by Google’s update today, slow and steady wins the race. While a graphic might get you a burst of link or social authority, it has to be followed by a lot more hard work.

Thanks Again,

Spencer

Well, a lot of the people pumping out bad infographics also have some pretty impressive networks of fake twitter accounts / pinterest accounts / Facebook accounts. And more than a few different networks will share shares/likes/pins amongst themselves too, because it is not that hard to rebuild social networks.

I appreciate your post and can understand being sick of low quality infographics. Low quality, template-based infographics are annoying, no doubt about it. That being said, I have to respectfully disagree on a couple of things. (Big Disclaimer…my company designs and promotes infographics. I removed the link to my website and my last name so this is far from a sales pitch.)

Infographics are the definition of white-hat link building. “Build high quality content and people will link to it.” Nobody is making people link to and/or share infographics…people, websites, journalists, etc. link to them and share them because they want to or they feel their readers will get added value.

I can see how an embed code might leave a footprint of sorts…as does any viral link growth and most link building in general…especially social promotion through bitly and other trackable URLs, press releases, video marketing, etc….but I don’t see any reason, unless someone is very foolish i.e. using keyword rich anchor text in their ebed code, why this type of footprint is a bad thing. Granted, I think there’s some short term link devaluation when you get the same link over and over again w/ the same anchor, but long term I’ve found these links to be extremely beneficial. (Plus, why not rotate the embed code either on your site or in your outreach?) This also excludes the fact that many journalists/bloggers will use the graphic as a supplement to a larger story and not use the embed code.

Finally, the links that are attainable via infographics are of remarkable quality. If it’s alright with you, I’ll share a few links from recent infographics I’ve done (you can email me and I’ll provide a link in a comment here). Point being, they garnered editorial links from ReadWriteWeb, National Geographic, Mashable, Business Insider, FoxNews, LifeHacker, Inc.com, EFF.org, and on and on. And the SEO value of these links is undoubtedly very, very real.

I wish this was my blog too so I could right a more lengthy response:) Seriously, I can assure you that I’m as sick of crappy infographics as you are. But I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and deem them a tactic of the past that’s ineffective, counter-productive, or “red flag raising”.

At the end of the day, it’s about what people want. if they didn’t want or enjoy infographics, then nobody would be using them.

Thanks for letting me rant on your blog,

Spencer

Any thoughts on “what’s next”?

In the end, I think people will look to share whatever it is, if it is quality. But that doesn’t really help the Google algo in determining if a link is genuine quality or not.

Scale of the Universe 2: http://htwins.net/scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white
Well worth looking at if you haven’t seen it yet.

I think the real key is creativity and research. Not enough people find an interesting niche and then represent the info in an original way. Alex is right – I’d love to see more infographics that were interactive and made use of video and audio. Hopefully we will, and people will start to reconsider the infographic as having value in itself as content, rather than just as a linkbait tool