Hosting images externally

[bjalc2011]

In these days of CDNs does it matter for SEO whether images (and PDFs etc.) are hosted off-site?

Does it make a difference if images hosted on Flickr, photobucket etc.

Thanks

[O2C]

As long as they still have ALT tags and such I don't think it would make any difference.

The only thing to consider would be the loading speed. As if it has to go off to another server/site to retrieve the image it may take longer to load and affect your page load speed (slow speed is bad for SEO).

[GlobeRunner]

When it comes to hosting images off site, keep in mind that there may be connectivity and image load speed issues associated with these images. I typically wouldn't rely on an image being pulled from someone else's site, even if it was something like Flickr or Photobucket. I don't think those particular services intend for you to use their service like that.

Rather, we typically will set up a CDN for hosting the images or PDFs, and use a subdomain of the main site in order to host the images. For example, we would set up images.domain.com and pdf.domain.com and put the images and PDFs on the CDN.