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In the home page of my e-shop I usually have banners with links to the (at that time) most important pages.

These banners change frequently, like one to twice a month, and they usually don't have any visible text so I suppose they don't have a big impact on SEO.

They also kind of big, about 1200px wide, and this is a drawback for the mobile version of the site (maybe the desktop one, I'm not sure), so I'd like to use other, smaller images for the mobile view of the site.

So, my thought is to not have a banner at all in the source and just load one later with JS. That way I could load whatever I want depending on the client's device.

So my question is:

How important are those banners for the SEO, considering that they change frequently and they are nothing but images with alt text?

Will the speed benefit of loading the content asynchronously be enough to overcome the possible SEO loss?

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  • Why not use CSS media queries?
    – MrWhite
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 13:25
  • @w3dk I could of course, but to do what exactly? Hiding my big images with css won't prevent them from loading and resizing them will still load the full image. What I want is to just load the appropriate content for each client device.
    – xpy
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 13:30
  • @w3dk Media queries don't change the content, they change the way the content looks. It is not the same thing. If I have an image that is 1200x1200 and 200kb I can only change the way it is presented to the user, not it's physical properties, setting it's width and height at 200px won't change its size in kb.
    – xpy
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 13:37

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Yes the speed gives a benefit to your seo rankings but you can't load the content async as crawler will not be able to index that content if you load content itself through ajax or some script.

Since those banners are linked to some important pages you should not remove them as presence of these links on home page increase their authority.

So solution can be a lazy load on images keeping the alt tags and hyperlinks in-tact so that you do not lose your rankings.

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  • I am aware that the crawler won't be able to crawl my dynamic content, that the reason of the question, but considering that the images of the banner and the links to my pages change frequently, e.g. in summer they all link to summer clothes and in winter to winter clothes are they important enough for the SEO to keep them?
    – xpy
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 13:41
  • Yes they are important and its good that the content changes frequently so that all content on your site gets some juice by getting linked from home page. Also the links and html are not resource intensive, the images are if you load them synchronously. So what i was suggesting is keep all the html data in place and add lazy load to images if optimization is a concern
    – abhinsit
    Commented Mar 29, 2016 at 17:08

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