- We want to increase the value of some of our important images by means of SEO, and
- we want to start serving them from a different, i.e. cookieless, domain.
We want to go from www.example.com/images/1234.jpg to www.example.com/germany/bavaria/landscape.jpg which can easily be done via URL rewriting. Then on the other hand, we would like to serve the image from a completely different domain, let's say www.examplestatic.com/germany/bavaria/landscape.jpg, to save the overhead of sending the cookie from www.example.com.
Somehow I feel that this is not a good idea because I move the image away from the content by putting it on a different domain. Can anyone shed some light on this problem? Naturally, I would just use a different subdomain, e.g. img.example.com, but we already use subdomains for languages and our cookies are valid for all subdomains of example.com, so this won't help.
UPDATE:
We are not so much worried about the search-ability of the images themselves, it's rather all about optimizing the pages they appear on. So a telling name/url for an image including a telling alt
attribute is probably a must have - but my question is about the domain part, if it's a bad idea to use a different domain.
But then again, the big players also have dedicated static content domains, e.g. images-amazon.com, ebaystatic.com, ... so there can't be anything wrong with it, can there?
END UPDATE
I'd really appreciate any hints.
Cheers,