Two different websites with same product images

Question

I need some advice from more experienced webmasters.
I have 2 websites (site A and site B). These websites are totally different, but they use same product images (around 1 GB of images). These websites are on same hosting server.

For now, site A has own folder with images and site B has own.
I'm wondering if there is a way to have two different websites with only 1 folder with images, so I could save some time and disk space on server.

I read a bit about CDN (Content Delivery Network) but I'm not sure if it may help me. I'm using API to grab product images, so I need a way to upload images on remote server automatically. Maybe there is another way to achieve this?

Answer 1

This is easier than you think. You can host the images on one of the two websites and simply use the full URL of the images to load them.

For example, if you host the images on website A, you would load the images on website B using:

http://websitea.com/images/image1.jpg

No CDN or any special configuration required. Just basic HTTP.

Answer 2

If you use src="images/xxx.jpg" in site A and in site B you can set <base href="site_a" /> in header of site B.

This reads all images from site_a URL. Warning! Too read JS and CSS files...

Answer 3

I would be careful about negatively affecting SEO rankings. Google might penalize your sites because it thinks the content is duplicate. I am not an SEO expert but wanted to throw it out there so you are aware.

I found these two links that talk about duplicate content http://www.highrankings.com/duplicate-content-google-346 http://onlinebusiness.volusion.com/articles/13-most-common-seo-mistakes/