Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Reducing cumulative layout shift for responsive images - core web vitals
In preparation for Core Web Vitals becoming a ranking factor in May 2021, we are making efforts to reduce our Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) on pages where the shift is being caused by images loading. The general recommendation is to specify both height and width attributes in the html, in addition to the CSS formatting which is applied when the images load. However, this is problematic in situations where responsive images are being used with different aspect ratios for mobile vs desktop. And where a CMS is being used to manage the pages with images, where width and height may change each time new images are used, as well as aspect ratios for the mobile and desktop versions of those. So, I'm posting this inquiry here to see what kinds of approaches others are taking to reduce CLS in these situations (where responsive images are used, with differing aspect ratios for desktop and mobile, and where a CMS allows the business users to utilize any dimension of images they desire).
Web Design | | seoelevated3 -
How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?
We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?
Web Design | | lcourse1 -
Best SEO-friendly CMS platform?
I have been tasked with rebuilding a small e-commerce website using a CMS, but I'm not sure which one has the most SEO compatibility. One SEO company recommended Squarespace. Another warned me against Squarespace because of its limited SEO features and instead recommended Wordpress with the WooCommerce toolkit. I've also heard Drupal and Joomla mentioned. Are certain CMS platforms more SEO-friendly? If so, what are the best ones that can also handle e-commerce? Thanks!
Web Design | | businessimagesolutions1 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Above the Fold Content - Use of large images
Hi All, Our designers have come to the SEO team to ask if have a large image across the top of the page taking up a large majority of the above the fold real estate will impact our SEO. Our initial thoughts are no as long as we have an optimised H1 visibal to the user landing there which informs them what the page is about. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Web Design | | J_Sinclair1 -
How to know if a wordpress theme is coded correctly for Seo
Hi, So I am curious if there is a tool to see if a site is coed properly for Google? I am running Avada, a standalone theme, yet I am also using a cache plugin. But when I search my code, its all like on one huge line. So I am curious if there is a way to verify or check if a theme is coded correctly? Thank you
Web Design | | Berner1 -
Decreasing Page Load Time with Placeholder Images - Good Idea or Bad Idea?
In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image. When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question. However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image. How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?
Web Design | | airnwater0