SEO Tycoon

**Towhid** · 04-01-2009, 02:52 PM

For example if I host some very essential images like background, logo, header and footer backgrounds, etc. on third party image hosts like photobucket or tinypic, would this diminish my site's reputation in the eyes of the mighty search engines?

Obviously I want to do this to save on bandwidth costs.

**LadynRed** · 04-01-2009, 03:33 PM

Don't think it matters a bit for SEO, but it WILL slow your site down. Once an image like a background is retrieved the first time, it's cached on the users machine, so your bandwidth hit is minimal - unless you've got huge images.

**willcode4beer** · 04-01-2009, 04:41 PM

The browser can still cache externally hosted images. Though, like LadynRed said, if those sites are slow they'll slow down your site.

On the topic, here are real, we have a cluster of image servers that are basically stripped down apache box with no modules. The idea being that all they do is serve up images really fast. This greatly reduces the load on the app servers. For us, hosting images on the app servers could grow a cluster of 50 boxes to about double.

Even on willcode4beer, I run my images (and other files) from i.willcode4beer.com

**ShawnITSolution** · 04-02-2009, 12:36 AM

To be honest, I personally believe that this could hurt SEO. I say this because, if something is loaded up externally like this, then it will not be able to be given any ALT characteristics, and this ALT is what search engines look for in order to be able to describe what that image is about.

**camar** · 04-02-2009, 02:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LadynRed

Don't think it matters a bit for SEO, but it WILL slow your site down. Once an image like a background is retrieved the first time, it's cached on the users machine, so your bandwidth hit is minimal - unless you've got huge images.

Good advice.I will try it.

**Johnantony** · 04-02-2009, 07:22 AM

I dont think that it makes any effect for SEO.if you are hosting external images then your site may be slow.so it is not effecting your site's SEO.

**Towhid** · 04-02-2009, 10:11 AM

So it seems it wouldn't harm SEO. I agree with the slowing down part though major image hosts I reckon are reliable in terms of speed. I was just thinking it would affect SEO because the SE bots would think "hey this guy doesn't even host his own images, how serious can this site be". Then I realized I was giving the bots a human intellect, but then again could there be such an algorithm at play

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShawnITSolution

To be honest, I personally believe that this could hurt SEO. I say this because, if something is loaded up externally like this, then it will not be able to be given any ALT characteristics, and this ALT is what search engines look for in order to be able to describe what that image is about.

Actually you can still add alt tags, it's just that the image source url would point to an external file.