Fun with a 301 redirect

I purchased a really good URL about 6 months ago with the ‘08 US election cycle in mind. I teamed up with a friend and we decided to turn the site into a humor site where we would pick on one of the democratic candidates. About 3 months ago we put up a hand full of posts that also contained some funny pictures. After those initial posts we let the site mellow. Since then the only thing I have done to the site is throw the occasional backlink at it when I have found the opportunity.

All that said, over the last few weeks we have started to rank fairly well for a few long tail searches. While adding a new post to the site yesterday I noticed that we had gotten a really great backlink from a PR5 blog. The problem was that the backlink was a link to an image. The link looked like this:

<a href=”http://SITE.com/img/Political-Topic-1.jpg”>REALY GREAT KEYWORDS</a>

So this is what I did. I renamed the original image to Political-Topic-2.jpg. Then I went in and updated my post to point to the new image. After I updated the post I then went into my .htaccess file and added this line.

RewriteRule ^img/Political-Topic-1.jpg Post-Name/ [L,R=301]

I am not sure why it took me so long to think about doing this. I run about 15 sites and I have images on almost all of them. There has been a time or two where I have gotten dugg on an image and the image has received a ton of backlinks.

So do you think it will work?

I have never done this before, so I am watching it closely to see how the search engines react to it. Would you consider this experiment Black Hat? Will it pass the keyword value to the post? Will it pass PageRank? What do you think?

I would be interested if anyone else has done this to know your results?