Is Base64 encoding images in general better for SEO or worse?
-
We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general.
One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK.
My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.
-
Hi Chris,
To my understanding, my take is that, unless Google Image search is an important channel for your business, the improvements to page speed/UX will be a net gain for SEO.
Using Base64 encoding for images may result in those images falling out of Google Image search, but the pages themselves are not likely be negatively impacted.
Caveat: Google has not communicated on the impact of this specifically, and we've not tested this with Distilled clients - I've based my answer on my understanding of Google's technology, their emphasis on all things page speed and the fact that this approach is growing across the web (so it's likely Google has already solved for this or else will have soon).
Best,
Mike
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
-
Menu impact on SEO
we have a single page web application for an ecommerce website. I think it is built in angular. One UX features we are exploring is the use of a "Products" Item on the menu with the categories showing on a menu rather than directly present on the header. The aim being to keep the header nice and clean. The result of this is that the categories which would typically sit in the header will now not be immediately visible until the menu is opened. Let's say I want to rank well for "building materials". Traditionally the view would be that this word would need to be in the header and marked up with the appropriate h tag. Will moving "building materials" into a product menu be detrimental for SEO? My initial thought is that as long as it is coded correctly there shouldn't be any impact on SEO. Can anyone give me their expert SEO view?
Technical SEO | | built_bot0 -
Squarespace Images
Hello, working on a squarespace website and I can't see any gallery images being indexed, only blog images. Searching for the problem in Google seems to imply that Squarespace images in galleries can't be indexed due to the use of a CDN. Is that the case? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
Subdomains or Subdirectory for multisite SEO structure?
Hey Mozzers, I work for a startup releasing several apps all within their own niches: hiking, mountain biking, skiing, running etc.. We've decided to go for the Wordpress Multisite route and I was wondering what the best site structure was. For example: Would hike.myapp.com or myapp.com/hike be more beneficial to our growth plans? My thinking follows that of geotargeting strategies for franchises (uk.travel.com etc) and to go for the subdomain option in order to build each individual 'sites' authority because each sport has niche audiences. Or am I talking nonsense? I've read varying advice and thought I'd ask you guys. Cheers, A
Technical SEO | | AdamRob011 -
Is dash problem for seo?
My web site http://www.green-lotus-trekking.com is this problem for google search engine optimization? Some little percentage problem or totally I am in Confusion?
Technical SEO | | agsln0 -
Website redesign: impact on SEO rankings?
Hi We're redesigning a website for a client whose SEO rankings are fairly strong, and are driving a good volume of enquiries through their website. We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results. The content will be similar on many pages, with the major updates being from 2013 products to the 2014 suite. Layouts and images will, of course be updated, and we're going to do our best to keep the inbound links going to the correct place - any advice here would be much appreciated, too. We'd be really grateful for any suggestions for how to avoid a ranking disaster, and any major pitfalls we should look out for. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kal-SEO0 -
Pageflip SEO friendly?
Client of mine utilizes pageflip for their product brochures and would love to have this content be crawl-able by search engines. Is there a way to make them SEO friendly so I may utilize this content?
Technical SEO | | richn330 -
Duplicate Content on SEO Pages
I'm trying to create a bunch of content pages, and I want to know if the shortcut I took is going to penalize me for duplicate content. Some background: we are an airport ground transportation search engine(www.mozio.com), and we constructed several airport transportation pages with the providers in a particular area listed. However, the problem is, sometimes in a certain region multiple of the same providers serve the same places. For instance, NYAS serves both JFK and LGA, and obviously SuperShuttle serves ~200 airports. So this means for every airport's page, they have the super shuttle box. All the provider info is stored in a database with tags for the airports they serve, and then we dynamically create the page. A good example follows: http://www.mozio.com/lga_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/jfk_airport_transportation/ http://www.mozio.com/ewr_airport_transportation/ All 3 of those pages have a lot in common. Now, I'm not sure, but they started out working decently, but as I added more and more pages the efficacy of them went down on the whole. Is what I've done qualify as "duplicate content", and would I be better off getting rid of some of the pages or somehow consolidating the info into a master page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0