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Related - SEO for naming images

In an effort to increase the perceived speed of a heavy homepage, I'm loading a number of the heavier images via javascript on document.ready. I'm using a blank gif as a placeholder src in my img tags with all of the appropriate alt and title tags. When the document is ready, then, I simply swap out the src for the img tags with the real image that I want displayed.

All of the images are named SEO appropriate names and alt and title tags are filled with (non-keyword-stuffed) SEO appropriate content.

Will this technique have any impact, positive or negative, on how Google perceives and scores the page?

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  • If the homepage is heavy, maybe there's too much content/links on it, and that can be confusing for the user, specially if it's the first time on the site. Progressive jpegs have advantages over your JavaScript replacement.
    – Osvaldo
    Jan 14, 2012 at 18:00
  • For blank picture (or small sized picture), alt is not count to SEO
    – Eric Yin
    Jan 14, 2012 at 22:49
  • An added note about this technique -- nczonline.net/blog/2009/11/30/…
    – Jacob G
    Jan 16, 2012 at 18:38

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It shouldn't have any effect on the page itself, but by using blank images you won't get any rankings in Image Search.

I would first look at reducing the file size of the images on the homepage if possible, e.g. via PNGcrush or using lower-quality JPEGs. Any "non-content" images can be moved to CSS sprites and loaded as one background image to save on HTTP requests.

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  • I have expressed the need to the powers that be to reduce the weight of the page. All of the jpegs are at reduced quality and we're sprite-ing where appropriate. They've explained that they don't want to reduce the number of images, so, I'm trying to improve the perceived loading speed without impacting any SEO efforts. As this is an ecommerce site, any negatives in even an Image Search won't be acceptable. Maybe I'll attach some analytics to them to see if user's even click on them and use that to convince them. Thanks.
    – Jacob G
    Jan 15, 2012 at 2:03

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