Lazy-load img src will negatively impact SEO

Question

I am working on a trading website. We show 40 images in our results. We are striving to reduce the loading time on our page, and since the images block the onload event, I consider lazy loading them by first setting img.src = "" and then setting them after loading. Please note that this is not ajax loading of html fragments. an html image along with alt text is present. it's just an src image set aside.

Does anyone have any ideas as to whether this could harm SEO or lead to Google’s penalty box now that they measure site speed?

Answer 1

Images do not block anything, they are already lazy loaded. The onload notifies you that all content has been loaded, including images, but this is long after the document is ready.

This can damage your rank due to lost keywords and empty src attributes. You are likely to lose more than you can - you better optimize your page in other ways, including your images. Gzip + fewer requests + validity period itself + fast static server must go a long way. There is also a free CDN that might interest you.

I am sure that Google does not mean that the entire website will remove their images from the source code in order to get a few points. And keep in mind that they believe that something under the age of 3 years is a good load time, there is a lot of room for wiggle before resorting to voodoo techniques.

Answer 2

From a pure SEO point of view, you should not index pages of search results. You must index the home page and product detail pages and have a wide way to access these pages (category pages, sitemap.xml, etc.).

Here's what Matt Cutts has to say on the subject, in a 2007 message:

In general, we saw that users usually do not want to see search results (or copies of websites through proxies) in search results. Proxied copies of websites and search results that do not add much significance already fall under our quality guidelines (for example, “Do not create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with almost duplicate content” and “Avoid doorways” created only for of search engines, or another “cookie cutter” is appropriate ... "), so Google is taking action to reduce the impact of these pages in our index.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

This does not mean that you will be punished for indexing search results, so Google will pay little attention, so lazy loading images (or not) will not have a lot of impact.

Answer 3

There are several ways to approach this issue.

Images do not block the load. Javascript does; style sheets to some extent (this is complicated); no images. However, they will use http connections, of which the browser will only launch 2 for each domain.

So, what you can do is to be hassle-free, and the “Right Thing” is to make a poor person’s CDN and just drop them onto www1, www2, www3, etc. on your own site and servers. There are several ways to do this without much difficulty.

On the other hand: no, this should not affect your SEO. I don’t think that Google actually even uploads images.

Answer 4

Our results display 40 images.

first question, is this page even a landing page? is it for a specific keyword? internal search result pages are not automatically landing pages. if they are not landing pages, then do whatever you want with them (and make sure they are not indexed by Google).

if they are landing pages (a page designed for a specific keyword), site performance is really important for the speed of conversion of these pages and indirectly (and to a lesser extent also directly) for Google. therefore, good loading logic for pages with lots of images is a good idea.

I would like to:

upload the first two (product?) images in an optimized way (like plain HTML, with the target text alt and the target file name). lazy load logics are created for the rest of the images. but not just set src = to empty, but insert the entire img onload tag (or onscroll or something else) into your code.

with lots of broken img tags in HTML for users without javacript (i.e.: google, old mobile devices, textviewer) is not a good idea (you won’t get a fine until lazy uploaded images skip), but crap markup is never a good idea .

for a general SEO question visit https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ (stack overflow more for programming related issues)

Answer 5

I have to disagree with Alex. Google recently updated its algorithm to track page load time. According to the official google blog

... today we are incorporating a new signal into our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Website speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the most important aspect of SEO is original, quality content.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Answer 6

I have added lazyload to my website ( http://www.amphorashoes.ro ), and I have the best pagerank from google (perhaps because the content loads faster) :)

Answer 7

firstly, do not use src = "", it can prey on your page, instead make a small loading image. secondly, I think that this will not affect SEO, in fact we always use alt = "imgDesc .." to describe this image, and the spider can catch this alt, but not analyze this image, whatever it really would be in fact.