We've made a lot of changes to our website (https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/) over the years, with our website developer putting a heavy emphasis on improving page loading times in general.

One of the those changes has been to base64 encode or in-line the majority of images on our site which has reduced our loading times down to under a second for most of our pages for our visitors which are mainly based in the UK.

My question is whether in-lining the images, thus removing the images filenames for index association results in this technique being a net-good or net-bad for our sites SEO in general, particularly on our frontpage.

Many thanks all. The crawler is currently in the process of creating an image sitemap as we speak. We tweaked the website a little to ensure the ALT text is spot on for the product in question before starting this process.

As mentioned my only reason for asking was to ensure that we weren't providing what would essentially have been redundant information for no reason whatsoever (ie Meta Keywords) but you've convinced me that it is a good idea.

Speak soon and thanks again.

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site.

The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason.

From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

It goes without saying but also ensure that as well as 301'ing all the old URL's, that you create a robots.txt to stop Google potentially spidering the new subdomain which contains the legacy files.

Best of luck!

I believe there is indeed talk of Google factoring in nofollow links from reputable sources (Wikipedia for example) however I'm almost certain that blog comments won't be included within this.

We received exactly the same response following a recent reconsideration request after several failed attempts where they reiterated that we still had bad links.  We continued removing questionable links over the following six weeks while I waited to see if they would follow it up with something a little more enlighten but unfortunately nothing was forthcoming.

As such I submitted another reconsideration request asking if they could possibly elaborate slightly and after just two days received exactly the same response again.  As such I’m still a little puzzled.

I think Adam has hit the nail on the head.  We recently moved our blog site from a subdomain to a subfolder and 301'd all the old URL’s with the intention that any entries that users find genuinely useful or interesting will be potentially linked to, thereby providing a benefit to the root domain.

As long as your blog is tightly related to your core business activity then I would go down the subfolder root although, in all honesty, I think subdomains potentially look a little more professional.

I believe there is indeed talk of Google factoring in nofollow links from reputable sources (Wikipedia for example) however I'm almost certain that blog comments won't be included within this.

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site.

The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason.

From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?