SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
-
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking.
Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A.
My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A.
Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google.
My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked.
Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
-
thanks for this report
-
I was going to guess that there is a small benefit. But really it's a guess. I would think it would count as a link.
-
Actually, that IS the one answer I do know and that it DOES have a benefit to you if your image is being hotlinked to because Google sees it as a "vote" or the equivalent of an inbound link. I saw that on the Google Webmaster Forums.
I'm just at a quandary about the linker.
-
How about other people hotlinking images from your domain. Do you think that google sees them pulling content from you via the image link and gives you a small credit for that?
I don't know the answer. I assume that the value is low to nothing. Do you have any ideas on this?
-
Interesting question. My gut instinct is that there is no SEO drawback to what is happening here. There is nothing in the quality guidelines that I'm aware of that says you can't hotlink images from another site. Now, if the content was duplicated then that's another issue.
-
It loos like nothing bad will happen, but that you lose a lot of SEO benefits from having images stored locally and getting the proper attribution.
I agree. I don't know how much SEO benefits come from hot-linked images. But, in case there is any benefit we have all of our images on our own domain and that requires terrabytes of BW per month.
-
I think you and I are on the same page and the same school of thought. I was just curious if there was any documented issues with being a "hotlinker" from an SEO perspective.
It loos like nothing bad will happen, but that you lose a lot of SEO benefits from having images stored locally and getting the proper attribution.
My other concern was making sure that it didn't look like their site was scraping from the other since they have thousands of products and ALL of those product images are being pulled from the other domain.
-
Right. That's why I have all of my images on the same server as the domain.
-
I can see your view, but the attribution is pretty important in their industry which is retail. I'm just concerned that to give image attribution over to another domain may be viewed as image hotlinking or scraping and that, as you said, they also won't get the benefit of a hotlink is someone else chooses to do the same.
-
hmmm.... To me, this sounds like moving your whole office because your trash can is full.
-
The programmer just added another piece to this and has added;
"What I'm suggesting is like a 'symbolic' link in Unix . There are no different IP involved. Only IP will be Site B for example. We store everything on same server and virtual directory map to another folder on same server and its intranet and no visibility outside server"
While I understand what he's saying. Site B won't get the benefit of image hotlinking if it had the same images stored on its own domain and I just this since the coding specifically says "site.com/images", it's just not hiding it correctly and again, even if it does effectively hide it, is it truly invisible to Google that that is going on. And if it's not invisible, will it send off more red flags and look suspicious to Google. I really don't want to risk that. I just wonder if I'm over-reacting to this. I don't think that I am.
-
More and more people are placing their images and other large files on cloud servers because they sometimes offer a cost advantage and they sometimes allow a website to load faster.
Because of this I don't think that Google is going to give a site a huge penalty if they are pulling content from a second domain. This is being done by some of the highest quality and most popular sites on the web.
However, I think like you and have all of my images on my own domain. Then if people are hotlinking them they will be coming from my site and I will get any credit for that - if google smiles about it, which I am not sure that they do.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
AMP vs Responsive Design? Mobile SEO
Hello !! We are developing a new website with responsive design. As is recommended, the idea would be to have a unique site for mobile and desktop, with same content and same url for both devices, using responsive design to adapt the layout depending on the device. My doubt in here is about the AMP pages? If my website has responsive design, perfectly optimized for mobile do I need somehow AMP pages? As far as I understand, these amp pages would be useful if I had different pages for mobile, but this is not the case. Am I correct or am I missing something? Thanks for your help :
Web Design | | AutoEurope1 -
SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do... MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have. If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them? Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
Web Design | | BrianGilmore
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff. EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.0 -
Will changing product from Grouped to Simple on my magento category page affect my SEO?
Hi all, A category page on my site http://www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk/wood-effect.html currently ranks number 3 on Google for the keyword "Wood Effect Tiles" We're currently reorganising some of our product and I would like to know if this is going to affect the SEO and ranking for the above page and keyword. The majority of products on that page are magento grouped products. I would like to change the page so that it displays only the different constituent simple products rather than the grouped products on the category page. My question is, will this have any impact on SEO? I intend on leaving all other data on the category page the same - so the metadata and the description/title etc. Any help/comments would be much appreciated! Ben
Web Design | | piazza0 -
Mega Dropdown Menus affect SEO results?
Our e-commerce website http://www.autoidsavings.com has a mega multi-level dropdown menu on top that we wanted to re-design. The real problem is the Shop By Brand menu which hovers down to 4 level at most. Our options are: 1. Limit the dropdown menu to 2 levels total. (currently have 4 levels the most) 2. Completely remove Shop By Brand Menu and create a page like https://www.cdw.com/content/brands/?cm_sp=GlobalHeader--Products|Brands--Home My concern is that will either changes help or destroy our SEO results?
Web Design | | Mobile_ID0 -
Does using role="heading" instead of H1 in HTML code affects SEO?
Does using role="heading" instead of affect SEO? http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Headings_using_role%3Dheading
Web Design | | LNEseo0 -
The Best Wordpress Templates and The Best SEO Plugins??
Hey guys, I am a newbie and after so many painstaking hours of building my new site using the WIX platform, I just found out that WIX is not SEO friendly 😞 So referring to (copy n pasted) the old post below posted in by Big Bazza back in June 2011, does anyone agree or have any updated information they can assist me with so I can get my new site started ? Cheers 🙂 www.studiopress.com - excellent templates and support is first class! EDIT: These all support WP 3.0 and are SEO friendly too! (They have modified the SEO functionality) However, the framework also allows you to run Yoast Wordpress SEO - which is generally considered the best SEO plugin for WP. http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
What are some of the best Word Press themes for SEO?
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best wordpress themes to use? Here is one that has been recommended to me before: http://www.smallbiztheme.com/
Web Design | | webestate0 -
Can SEO Moz perform a full site crawl and provide a report showing all URLs within an existing domain?
We are conducting a site redesign and need to get an idea of all pages that are out there on our domain (in some report fashion). This would help for discovery and cleanup as we re-work the site and move to a new CMS. Thanks
Web Design | | DCondon0