If you have been following along, YouTube Image Posts are Google’s challenge to Instagram. On Wednesday, April 8th, YouTube took another step at challenging any other picture or photo sharing app. YouTube allowed users to find individual URL for each YouTube Image Post. This was not possible prior.
When clicking the “Share” button on a YouTube video on mobile, there is now an option to “Repost on YouTube” as well as “Copy link.” The “Repost on YouTube” is also new as of March 2026, but the “Copy link” option is much bigger for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons.
Any time there is any opportunity to post a link from a highly authoritative website, you can be rest assured the SEO world is going to be all over it. So much so that the new Digg had to shut down because of the SEO power that a Digg dot com link offered.
Now that we are seeing a copy link button on YouTube Image Posts, it will be a short amount of time before we start seeing YouTube Image Posts showing up at the top of Google Search, Google Image Search and YouTube Search.
For those that do not know, the Google algorithm was built on links. A highly authoritative website linking to another website gives Google the signal to rank it higher in search. SEO experts and gurus are going to start linking to these YouTube Image Posts and we will start seeing them anywhere the Google search algorithm is deployed.
There is absolutely no reason to not be posting to YouTube Images at this point. Google has basically told creators they are going all in with Image Posts and now there are opportunities to link to these images. We will track the optimization of these posts and will report when they start to populate. Here is an example of a Walk for Peace Monks in Houston, Texas post on YouTube Images.
The next step will be for YouTube to allow creators to embed posts with an embed code. An embed is nothing more than a link to the YouTube Image with a iFrame that allows the image to show up on someone else’s website. This is all search engine optimization and most will never even know.
SEO Value of Individual URLs
A URL, Uniform Resource Locator, is simply the address of a webpage. This is the http:// that you see in the URL bar of the browser. What many may not realize is there is an entire generation of Internet or web users that have never used a browser nor do they understand what a URL is.
The webpage address is the home of the content. The only way Google, or any algorithm, can rank content is to have a URL. This URL is then assigned a value called PageRank. The higher the PageRank, the more likely that particular webpage address is going to rank high in search results on YouTube, Google or any other search engine.
What many YouTube creators do not know is their virality is often associated with the fact that they are doing natural search engine optimization (SEO). Every time a YouTube video is embedded on another website or hyperlinked in a news article, it is getting SEO juice to rank higher in search.
The more popular a YouTube Channel, the more likely SEO is happening naturally. If a video goes viral on YouTube, it behooves news outlets and other websites to link to that video or embed it on their website. All these links and embeds send signals to Google and YouTube that this webpage address should rank for keywords related to the topic.