What are SEO affects when images hosted at different domain?

7 replies
Newbie question about SEO affects on image hosting location relative to site:

I have a site hosted with Firebase hosting, all under one domain, that has become too large - it has many images that I need to move to another solution.

Firebase recommends using a Google Cloud Storage bucket for user images.

But that means then my site and domain will be at (mod edit) one location but my images will have to move... to 'storage.cloud.google/....'

Sharing images, and having others hotlink to them from my site, is an important source of links to this site, I assume?

So that url change would kill me SEO-wise (if I made that change), right?
#affects #domain #hosted #images #seo
  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Hosting on cloud services is very common and should not affect your SEO. Practically all hosted eCommerce software hosts images on their cloud distribution servers (Shopify, for instance) rather than on your actual domain. This helps speed up image loading.

    Of course, the only exception I can think of might be if your website is selling images.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blakers1
    Dave's right. There's no impact to SEO and if anything, having faster load times with CDN hosting may improve your results a little bit.

    For images the main things that matter are your alt text, title and to a much lesser degree, the image file name.

    For making them load faster, I also like to use a compression tool like ShortPixel or WPsmush.
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    Blake Akers
    Webology

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  • Profile picture of the author Devilfish168
    Short pixel is a must if your site have tons of images.
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    • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
      We use TinyPNG for compression but I'm sure they all do more or less the same thing.

      One note on that ... it is a waste of time doing it for product images if you are using Shopify because Shopify does that for you. If you are embedding images into articles, however, it is a must.
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    Load time is very important for SEO. I do believe that this strategy will only help your site rank better.
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  • Profile picture of the author praetserge
    As long as the images load fast, you're fine.
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  • Profile picture of the author Klara Pelhe
    Originally Posted by David Parizek View Post

    Newbie question about SEO affects on image hosting location relative to site:

    I have a site hosted with Firebase hosting, all under one domain, that has become too large - it has many images that I need to move to another solution.

    Firebase recommends using a Google Cloud Storage bucket for user images.

    But that means then my site and domain will be at (mod edit) one location but my images will have to move... to 'storage.cloud.google/....'

    Sharing images, and having others hotlink to them from my site, is an important source of links to this site, I assume?

    So that url change would kill me SEO-wise (if I made that change), right?

    No, I definitely wouldn't say that this could be some real problem for you, as it's perfectly normal nowadays to have images hosted on some external or third-party service, and many providers actually require doing something like this. If you host your images into the cloud, for example, they will always be safe, even if you encounter some problems with the site at some point, nothing will happen to images and they will always load good, so this is definitely one of the biggest advantages of keeping them outside the site.

    Besides, hosting images on your own site isn't a good idea SEO-wise as they can occupy too many space and interupt good and fast loading speed, so I wouldn't recommend this, it's always better to keep them somewhere else, as your site will have better performances and that can have an impact on your overall ranking position.
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