CSS background images weight impact
-
Hi,
do you think that the use of a single 1.8Mb background image sitewide could have a big negative impact and make a website disappear from SERPS?thank you
-
Hi Gianni,
There are a ton of reasons why your website might have slipped down the SERPs or dropped rankings. It's almost certainly not because of your image.
If you want, you can PM me your URL and I'll have a look.
Nick
-
Hello,
I think the heavy wheight background image has been wrongly pubilshed without the proper jpg compression during last months... (maybe a webdesigner distraction).Anyway now the website is disappeared from SERPS,
I'm trying to spot the possible reason of this penalization, currently the homepage ranks "A" with Seomoz on page optimization tool for the primary keyword, and it's domain metrics are equals or superior to many competitors that rank in first page for the same keyword.
With this heavy wheight background image the overall wheight of the internal pages is about 2.8 Mb (html/css + scripts + inline images + css background images ), I think this is a really uncommon and high value.
If Google considers a page as "loaded" when all of its assets were actually downloaded from the server and not when the event "load" fires on the browser I think it could be a very negative factor.
Thank you all for your replies
(and sorry for my english) -
That is a pretty large image file, I do not know how it would impact the SERPS.
If you are using photoshop and saving the background image as a Jpg, one thing I always try to do is lower the quality when saving for web to around 30-40 for really large images (can notice a difference but not too bad) or lower the quality to 51 if you want the image to remain pretty much the same.
Another thing that I like to do is use Smush.it (http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/) which is a free tool from Yahoo that will save you a little on filesize without changing the appearance of the image.
Hope this helps!
-
1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.
I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.
A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.
-
Just to add - try and compress the image as much as you can.
I'd be more worried about waiting for it to load and it having a knock on effect on your user experience.
DD
-
Hi Gianni,
of course the huge image won't make the website disappear from the serps - if you define "disappear" that the website is banned from the index.
I suppose you know that speed / loading time already matters, but it is just one of many ranking factors and Matt Cutts said that very rare pages are concerned. But imagine that there is a website with exactely the same condition as yours then the one with less loading time will be "better" than yours.
Even though the image is in the css defined it is not the best idea. Did you really compress the image yet?
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
-
Combining adjacent image and text links
Hey, The pages on one of our sites has a lot of links on it, which I have read a couple of times can be bad for SEO, although many say don't worry too much about it. However, I was thinking to reduce links and also reduce code size combining adjacent image and text links. For example they current look like this:
On-Page Optimization | | mdeluk
"
Products page" I am thinking maybe I should change to the following:
"Products page" However, is this bad code and therefore could be bad for SEO? I have tried Googling this but couldn't seem to find anything on it.0 -
Ranking for a word when your image is showing up as #2?
I'm trying to rank for several specific words in my industry. I've noticed that many of the pages I'm trying to rank for the specific words, the main image of the page is being ranked. So my question is should I still try to rank my page even though the image is ranking as the first image displayed in the google results. Will this count against me by Google if I do? Or should I try to make the image being ranked more enticing for google searchers to try to increase traffic? Right now the images are not generating many clicks.
On-Page Optimization | | mr_w0 -
Alt Tags on multiple product images
Hi I work on SEO for an ecommerce site and wanted to find out how important it is to optimise all images with alt tags. We have alt tags in place, however have not optimised descriptions for the following example images: Front of cupboard Back of cupboard Side of cupboard etc Is this dangerous for SEO if these images all have the same alt tag? We have thousands of products so it would be a huge job to update these, but if it's crucial for SEO we can work through our priorities. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | BeckyKey0 -
Image Alt For Logo
I've just run an on page audit of my website www.octopus-hr.co.uk and it seems in reasonable shape. However, I wonder whether I'm missing a trick with the Image Alt for my company logo. The logo appears on every page and links back to the home page. Currently the Alt tag is just the Company name "Octopus". We develop HR Software and we would love to rank better for the term "HR Software". Is it legitimate to change the alt tag to "Octopus HR Software" for my logo or is considered spam and likely to get us hit with a penalty? Thanks in advance David
On-Page Optimization | | davidoff5744440 -
On page/site - Images & bold text
As I understand it on a page where you are going for the keywords 'Metal gates', you have an image titled 'Metal gates' (Lets say MG for Metal gates to save on my typing!) with the alt tag being 'MG' Now as I also understand it, if an image is also used as a link the Alt tag is also the anchor text? So, I have a page on Metal gates using the above methods, from this page I have image links to a metal driveway gates page (as well as text links), would I be best using an image titled 'Metal driveway gates' with the alt text as ' Metal driveway gates' to link to my metal driveway gates page (if you follow me)? Also on the image question, what if you have say six images (that are all links) on the metal gates page, how would you title the images and alt tags? Variations on Metal gates? Or using the keyword on the page that the link points to? (I'm not looking to keyword stuff but want to get it right! ) Also is it important to have your on page keywords in bold still? i ask because I've bolded text on my pages but not the main keywords - I've bolded text that I want people to see, but do not want to take away any power from my keywords if you follow me?
On-Page Optimization | | Jon-C0 -
Nofollow images to sculpt internal anchor tags
One of my client tags image-links with nofollow if those links are before a regular HTML link in the source code, e.g.:
On-Page Optimization | | Sebes
.
.
.
Check our page aboutreally cool shoes. They do this to "better pass anchor tags" to the page /page-about-shoes.html. My question: Is this a good practice to do? Thanks Sebes0 -
What's the best way to name an image for SEO?
Hi Guys,
On-Page Optimization | | krseo
I'm thinking about images and SEO. What's the best way for naming and using images in HTML Code? For example: Image-Name: keyword-keyword2-keyword3.jpg or keywordkeyword2keyword3.jpg ?
How many Keywords should I use max for a picture? And also do you use the alt tag as description of the image and the title tag or only the alt tag? If you use the title, what do you use it for? Maybe someone can copy a HTML-Code example for me 😉 Thank you 🙂
Alex0 -
Preferred Image Replacement Techniques
What is the preferred image replacement technique currently for CSS? I have been using the one that someone here at SeoMoz recommended a year or two ago, which was: Text to be hidden { #id { overflow:hidden; width:200px; //width of the image background-image: url(...); } #id span { display:block; width:1000px; height:1000px; }
On-Page Optimization | | TomBristol0