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.
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
-
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Size of image for article Schema
Hi, I implemented schema markup for an article and all tested fine and I can see it being fired in preview mode of Google Tag Manager. But when I run the URL which has it applied through Google Structured Testing tool it is not appearing. I have now read that the image needs to be a certain size. For AMP articles this appears to be 12oo pixels wide http://www.thesempost.com/google-changes-image-size-requirements-amp-articles/ But what about non-AMP articles? Does it need to be that big too?
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
How do you build your pre-sales seo audit
Hello Moz community, I'd like to know if you build "pre-sales seo audit" when selling your services to a prospect. I think the main idea of a pre-sales audit is to show your prospect that you understand his industry (trends & competition) understand the opportunities know the roadblocks on his website If so, i'd be interested in discussing the information you put into your pre-sales audit and how you organise it. If you know ressources i should read as regards to mini seo audit / pre-sales seo audit just paste the link 🙂 Thanks for your answers
Technical SEO | | Sindicic_Alexis0 -
Speed benefits from loading images from a subdomain
I have read that loading images from a subdomain of your site instead of the main domain will give you speed benefits on load time. Has anyone actually seen that to be the case? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
SEO for User Authenticated Content
Hi Everyone - I have a potential client who is seeking SEO for a site that contains about 95% of content only accessible through user authentication . Does anyone have tips for getting this indexed without having to open it up to the public? I was considering adding "snippets" into the robots.txt or creating an additional page with snippets linking to the login page. I'd appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | manutx0 -
Structuring URL's for better SEO
Hello, We were rolling our fresh urls for our new service website. Currently we have our structure as www.practo.com/health/dental/clinic/bangalore We like to have it as www.practo.com/health/dental-clinic-bangalore Can someone advice us better which one of the above structure would work out better and why? Should this be a focus of attention while going ahead since this is like a search engine platform for patients looking out for actual doctors. Thanks, Aditya
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Why are old versions of images still showing for my site in Google Image Search?
I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Techboy0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0