Authors Link Equity Regeneration Campaign

• Educate authors on importance of link equity and ways to generate intrinsic and extrinsic value from it
• Create a step by step checklist for creators on scrappy and sustainable way to host their own domains and canonical URLs
• Analyze and quantify link graphs data using Common Crawl project
• Build a provisional registry of canonical URLs
• Work with Wikipedia to replace links to hosting platforms with links to authors' domains
• Build tools to scan the internet for links pointing to hosting platforms and automagically replace attribution to authors' websites, for example, using a Wordpress plugin
• Build social media bots that attempt to detect Creative Commons images and automatically post attribution data

Link equity transfer using rel="canonical"

There is a standard RFC6596, cheap and technically simple way for any website to redirect link equity by using a canonical link relation. Rel="canonical" is supported by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Further reading

• Google
• Moz.com
• Canonical link element on Wikipedia

Implementation of rel="canonical" link tag by platforms for Creative Commons works would immediately restore an enormous amount of value for CC-licensed authors. Unfortunately, platforms and authors incentives are not aligned and it would be naive to assume that platforms would release captured link equity.