Disadvantages of linking to uncompressed images?

[Alex-Harford]

Images are compressed and resized to fit into an article, but each image in the article links to the original file - which in some cases is around 5Mb. The large versions of the images are indexed in Google.

Does this decrease the website's crawl budget due to the time spent downloading the large files?

Does link equity disappear through the image links?

Either way I don't think it's a very good user experience if people click on the article images to see the large images - there's no reason for the images to be so large.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks.

[RobertFisher]

Alex,

I love this kind of question probably because it's the kind that gets in my head and I cannot get rid of. In the scheme of things SEO it is likely small, but it's the small rock in the shoe.

My opinion is more around your use of a compressed image even though it links to the larger image, probably means you are ok on load time and indexing. Part of my thinking has to do with many real estate sites that have huge volumes of photo images. Most of them have the ability to load the larger image and some of them (especially on sites where higher end RE companies are using high quality photographers) get fairly large. I know for a fact these sites are not being hurt on any appreciable level.

Hope that helps. I realize it is not definitive.

Best

[ThompsonPaul]

The biggest point here to me, Alex, relates to your last sentence. There is absolutely no reason to ever have a 5 MB on a website in the first place unless you are expressly providing high-rez images for printing.

The downsides are so many that they actually dwarf the SEO implications

• most importantly, they make for massive backup files, which become unwieldy and prone to timeout failures when being generated or restored.
• you run the significant risk of unauthorised use of the images, since they are big enough to print from.
• you waste bandwidth and resources uploading such large files, and displaying them should users click on them
• you create a horrible user experience should any user accidentally click on them, especially if they're unfortunate enough to be on mobile.

As far as SEO goes, I honestly don't know the effect of such large images on crawlability. We know Google does process images (to power things like reverse image search) but I strongly suspect they would just skip that for such large images. They are predominant;y using meta-data and any captions/associated text for image indexing purposes.

As far as link equity - yup, those links to the larger image will take link equity with them just like any other link on the page. In addition, depending on the CMS configuration, those links may be going to attachment pages holding the images. (WordPress is famous for this problem by default.) They will look to the search crawlers like additional pages to be indexed, but since they're just images, they can look like thin content, and also are a major waste of crawl budget.

If this is a WordPress site, there are a number of plugins that can deal with the over-sized images in an automated way. Otherwise you can pull them down into Photoshop and use its automated batch processing to deal with them, then re-upload them.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[Alex-Harford]

Both very useful answers - thanks.