How google crawls images and which url shows as source?

[Tz_Seo]

Hi,

I noticed that some websites host their images to a different url than the one their actually website is hosted but in the end google link to the one that the site is hosted. Here is an example:

This is a page of a hotel in booking.com:

http://www.booking.com/hotel/us/harrah-s-caesars-palace.en-gb.html

When I try a search for this hotel in google images it shows up one of the images of the slideshow. When I click on the image on Google search, if I choose the Visit Page button it links to the url above but the actual image is located in a totally different url: http://r-ec.bstatic.com/images/hotel/840x460/135/13526198.jpg

My question is can you host your images to one site but show it to another site and in the end google will lead to the second one?

[Tz_Seo]

Hi Dirk,

Thank you very much for your answer!

[DirkC]

Google is indexing both - the url which is referring to the image & the image of the url itself. So yes - you can use two different domains. The domain that only contains the images will normally not be indexed (there is nothing to crawl there - the images are only accessible through the main domain).

Personally, if image search is important for you I would never put the images on a domain that you don't own (like e.g. an amazon s3 url). This isn't the case for Booking - the are also owner of the bstatic domain. The reason why they use this domain is probably performance related. Note that they also redirect the root of bstatic.com to booking.com.

Dirk