ArtSites Updates

Yesterday, Geoff and I received a number of emails from several artists asking what we thought about WikiGallery.

In all cases, the artists had received an "email request" to link to WikiGallery, in exchange for being listed on WikiGallery.

The message itself is by definition spam - i.e. unsolicited email.

So that’s a mark against them and their business practices.

That said, there is no obvious scam that we can find on their website.

However, there are online discussions stating that this website is "suspicious".

The website itself is trying to game the search engines by getting a lot of artists to link to them while providing links back to the artists website.

FYI - Google frowns on this kind of behaviour!

It’s an old game that the search engines know and sometimes penalize the websites involved — potentially your own website if you do this — making the websites, in fact, harder to find in search engines.

More importantly, WikiGallery also requires you to allow your artwork to be freely redistributable, as well as, allow others to make derivative works from yours! Yikes! ;-)

Most artists don’t want this!

Based on our assessment, we don't see much advantage in linking to them.

As always, we simply want to share our thoughts with you and make sure you have as much information as possible to make the best decisions!

Here's to getting discovered based on the merits of your work and artistry! ;-)