Technical Question on Image Links - Part of Addressing High Number of Outbound Links

[MediaCF]

Hi - I've read through the forum, and have been reading online for hours, and can't quite find an answer to what I'm searching for. Hopefully someone can chime in with some information.

For some background - I am looking closely at four websites, trying to bring them up to speed with current guidelines, and recoup some lost traffic and revenue. One of the things we are zeroing in on is the high amount of outbound links in general, as well as inter-site linking, and a nearly total lack of rel=nofollow on any links. Our current CMS doesn't allow an editor to add them, and it will require programming changes to modify any past links, which means I'm trying to ask for the right things, once, in order to streamline the process.

One thing that is nagging at me is that the way we link to our images could be getting misconstrued by a more sensitive Penguin algorithm. Our article images are all hosted on one separate domain. This was done for website performance reasons. My concern is that we don't just embed the image via , which would make this concern moot. We also have an href tag on each to a 'larger view' of the image that precedes the img src in the code, for example - We are still running the numbers, but as some articles have several images, and we currently have about 85,000 articles on those four sites... well, that's a lot of href links to another domain. 

I'm suggesting that one of the steps we take is to rel=nofollow the image hrefs. Our image traffic from Google search, or any image search for that matter, is negligible. On one site it represented just .008% of our visits in July. I'm getting a little pushback on that idea as having a separate image server is standard for many websites, so I thought I'd seek additional information and opinions. Thanks!

[Everett]

Hello Tesbat,

It sounds like you are using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve images, which is pretty standard. However, there are some best practices that I like to follow, and if your traffic from images is really that low it could be that you are already not following them.

First, I like to have a CNAME set up so the CDN exists on your own site's subdomain (e.g. cdn.yourdomain.com) as opposed to another server, (e.g. yourdomain.akamai.com). Every CDN company and host will differ on the details of how to set this up, but if you tell them you want the images to exist on a subdomain of yoursite.com I'm sure they can figure it out - if you don't already have it set up that way.

Second, don't change the filenames or basic folder structure. For example, if your images followed this format (/images/image1.jpg) and you went to a CDN that either renamed the images or put them in a totally different folder structure (e.g. /images/0000123.jpg or /CDN/assets/image1.jpg) you could lose some of the momentum you built up over time, especially if those image files are not redirected. Here's a case where that happened to someone.

Third, set up and verify the new CDN subdomain in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Add the geotargeting for the country you are targeting in case the IP address of the CDN is in another country. Typically this is not an issue for most sites, but is worth considering if the CDN is hosted in another country.

Fourth, continue to optimize your images with appropriate file names and alt attributes, and with the title attribute (as you do) when linking to larger versions of the image.

Don't worry about those links. I'd rather link to a bigger image than just have the thumbnail sitting there by itself. Just make sure you're actually linking to the image file, as opposed to another web page on which the larger image is embedded (e.g. image nodes in Drupal, or attachment pages in Wordpress).

Here are a few pages from Barry Schwartz worth reading:

• How Barry set up his Amazon S3 CDN
• Does Google Like CDNs?
• More from Google on CDNs and SEO