How important are original images in a website?
Simple true story, never copy any images and post it in your website (even if you include credits), even if it is a royalty free image with no copyright issues. Always have your own image, or modify the royalty free image and then rename it and then use it in your site.
Test lab results from PageRank0 for Image:
I had an image from a website - provided the credits, the image got crawled for “bones body” and it was listed in google - after few weeks - that image is removed from index. Not only that, it removed some of the other original images as well. The traffic reduced considerably for my test site and search result ranking got affected as well. Below you can find a single image - which shows the difference. Now what happened was the original site has good ranking for the image and as well for the content. The content was original in my test site - but it is now a good lesson learnt missing 200 unique visitors a day!
Original, Original and Original Images, Pictures or Photos, no copy/paste whatsoever!
And same thing happened for “Optical Illusion” keyword as well.
Now, with other test site which provides free Website Blog Headers, all of them are original and they keep appending in crawler and none of them had been removed so far for any reasons.
Regards,
Shiva