Hosting images externally
-
In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site?
Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc.
Thanks
-
When it comes to hosting images off site, keep in mind that there may be connectivity and image load speed issues associated with these images. I typically wouldn't rely on an image being pulled from someone else's site, even if it was something like Flickr or Photobucket. I don't think those particular services intend for you to use their service like that.
Rather, we typically will set up a CDN for hosting the images or PDFs, and use a subdomain of the main site in order to host the images. For example, we would set up images.domain.com and pdf.domain.com and put the images and PDFs on the CDN.
-
As long as they still have ALT tags and such I don't think it would make any difference.
The only thing to consider would be the loading speed. As if it has to go off to another server/site to retrieve the image it may take longer to load and affect your page load speed (slow speed is bad for SEO).
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
-
Hosted Wordpress Blog creating Duplicate Content
In my first report from SEOmoz, I see that there are a bunch of "duplicate content" errors that originate from our blog hosted on Wordpress. For example, it's showing that the following URLs all have duplicate content: http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/ys/
Technical SEO | | TomHu
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/16/vendome-prize-website/gallery-7701/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/sm/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/26/top-ten-tips-to-mastering-the-twitterverse/unknown/
http://blog.kultureshock.net/2012/11/20/the-secret-merger/bv/ They all lead to the various images that have been used in various blog posts. But, I'm not sure why they are considered duplicate content because they have unique URLs and the title meta tag is unique for each one, too. But even so, I don't want these extraneous URLs cluttering up our search results, so, I'm removing all of the links that were automatically created when placing the images in the posts. But, once I do that, will these URLs eventually disappear, or continue to be there? Because our blog is hosted by Wordpress, I unfortunately can't add any of the SEO plugins I've read about, so, wondering how to fix this without special plugins. Thanks!
Tom0 -
Does it matter if I leave image links pointing to old site when I move a wordpress blog?
Hi everyone I am moving a blog from one site to another. I have all the 301 redirects etc under control, but my question has to do with image links in the blogs. The image links all point over to the old site once the posts are copied over. Is this a major problem from an SEO perspective? Lots of links pointing out to an old site? It won't matter from the users perspective as I have 'none' for the image URL, so the user will never know. I will reload all the images if necessary but boy that will be a lot of work. Or is there a shortcut? Thanks very much Wendy
Technical SEO | | Chammy0 -
Jquery image - hidden text?
I'm working on a site that has a jquery image rotation. Wondering if how the developer set it up is consider blackhat or spammy at all. The jquery has 3 images that rotate. Each image has text in it - which is then placed in a H1 or H2 tag behind the images. When viewing the site with images and javascript turned off it looks like the text is the same color as the background and not lined up nicely so that it is visible to anyone who has images and javascript turned off. Let me know if this is a bad practice. If so, what is the best practice to handle this? If the text were another color and aligned neatly visible behind the image would it be safe? Should we just be using an image alt tag instead? What about losing the H1, H2 power then? Any other suggestions for improving the SEO for jquery image rotations where important text appears? I can PM the site URL if you want to take a look. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | IvieDigital0 -
Hosting sitemap on another server
I was looking into XML sitemap generators and one that seems to be recommended quite a bit on the forums is the xml-sitemaps.com They have a few versions though. I'll need more than 500 pages indexed, so it is just a case of whether I go for their paid for version and install on our server or go for their pro-sitemaps.com offering. For the pro-sitemaps.com they say: "We host your sitemap files on our server and ping search engines automatically" My question is will this be less effective than my installing it on our server from an SEO perspective because it is no longer on our root domain?
Technical SEO | | design_man0 -
Rel="external"
Hi all, I got a link and its off a site and marked up with rel="external". Is this a followed or nofollowed link? Does it pass link juice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sharer0 -
Automatic redirect to external urls
Hi all, I'm developing a dynamic qr code service.. The service works in the following way: You create an account with an associated QR CODE pointing to a url like:
Technical SEO | | raulo79
- http://domain.me/username The user can change the target of this url.. he can:
- point to an external url ( his website for example)
- point to a vCard download page
- a mobile ready webpage ( no redirection in this case)... Visiting http://domain.me/username my company logo is displayed and we redirect the visitor with a: header("Refresh: 5;URL=http://userdomain.tld"); Google is indexing many user's URLs, this is good for those users pointing to the mobile ready webpage, in this case there is no redirection, but Google is indexing many urls that redirect to an external url and I don't know how to avoid this.. I can't do an header('Location: http://www.example.com/'); because I need to display our logo after redirection.. how can I do google friendly? Sorry for my english, I hope you can undestand the problem. Best regards.
Mauro.0 -
Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt
Hi folks, No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!? To repeat: If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link? Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page? I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?
Technical SEO | | DaveSottimano0 -
Changing image path of the whole domain
Hi together, we are using a CDN for delivering static images. Due to some changes we want to change the path for images for the whole domain. like: images.example.com/old/var/test.jpg to images.example.com/new/var/test.jpg Does anyone know what could happend to SERPs? (old path will be available) Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0