would lazy-loading img src negatively impact SEO

Question

I\'m working on a shopping site. We display 40 images in our results. We\'re looking to reduce the onload time of our page, and since images block the onload event, I\'m con

Answer 1

There are some different ways to approach this question.

Images don't block load. Javascript does; stylesheets do to an extent (it's complicated); images do not. However, they will consume http connections, of which the browser will only fire off 2 per domain at a time.

So, what you can do that should be worry-free and the "Right Thing" is to do a poor man's CDN and just drop them on www1, www2, www3, etc on your own site and servers. There are a number of ways to do that without much difficulty.

On the other hand: no, it shouldn't affect your SEO. I don't think Google even bothers to load images, actually.

Answer 2

From a pure SEO perspective, you shouldn't be indexing search result pages. You should index your home page and your product detail pages, and have a spiderable method of getting to those pages (category pages, sitemap.xml, etc.)

Here's what Matt Cutts has to say on the topic, in a post from 2007:

In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results. Proxied copies of websites and search results that don’t add much value already fall under our quality guidelines (e.g. “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” and “Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…”), so Google does take action to reduce the impact of those pages in our index.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

This isn't to say that you're going to be penalised for indexing the search results, just that Google will place little value on them, so lazy-loading the images (or not) won't have much of an impact.