Using pictures from another domain

[Branden_S]

We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer.  Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server.  There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues.

Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues?  will this generate Google penalties?  Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it.  We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters.  How important is the file name for SEO?

[KeriMorgret]

Egol echoes what I was going to write. Would you trust someone else with a major portion of your website?

What immediately came to mind was this MySpace incident with John McCain in 2007. http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/

[EGOL]

Just saying what I believe and what I do.  Not saying that it is "right".

I don't want to call images from another domain.   I want google to see me as the source for all of my content.

I also don't want to rely on the manufacturer's server.  My sites are on fast, dedicated servers on a host that has almost zero downtime... only moments of downtime in the past decade.   Don't bet that delivery will be faster from the manufacturer.  Bet on yourself.

Manufacturers often have idiots running their websites.  They can put HUGE image files out there that download slowly.  Manufacturer's web team might move images around their server and not notify you.  They might also upload new images without telling you.   It can take you a while to realize that the images are missing or switched and in the meantime their idiots are making your website look like crap.  After they change or move images try to sort out that mess.  You will waste a lot more time than it would have taken to download the images and put them on your own server.

I think that we can produce better images here.   I want BIG images that are often not available from the manufacturers, I want multiple or different views that are not available from the manufacturer.   I want optimized images that download quickly and look nice.

So, in short, if I have a choice between betting on me or betting on the manufacturer, I am putting my money on me.

[hecklerponics]

Yes, I was referring to Content Distro Networks.

There are no quality issues as to why you can't or shouldn't do what you want to do.

[mosquitohawk]

The file name isn't as important for SEO as it used to be.  It can provide a useful signal as to the nature of the image's content and the text content around it.  It shouldn't cause any "issues" or penalties with your SEO, however, you may lose the side benefit of some/all traffic from image searches.

The biggest concern I would have is if the manufacturer decided to move, delete or rename images.

[Branden_S]

Are you referring to a CDN?  We use a CDN for our images.  However we are contemplating using the image url from the manufacturers website, instead of downloading and hosting the image on our domain.

[hecklerponics]

I echo Andy's response.  There are services that look and see where an IP is located then call the images on your page from a server closest to that user to improve load times (which is a ranking factor).

Cheers!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Branden,

You are fine using images hosted elsewhere - this is a well-used way to speed up page load times. You will get no penalty for going this and it won't impact on-site SEO either.

-Andy